It surprised many when debut author Robert Galbraith’s crime novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, started popping up in glowing, high-profile book reviews and articles all over the web and in newspapers and magazines. Why was this new author, whom no one had ever heard of before, getting such a big promotional push? Many critics raved about the book, but most consumers yawned. By last week, the book had only sold 500 copies TOTAL in the U.S. since its release in April of this year.
All of that changed when it was revealed this week that Robert Galbraith was merely a pseudonym for Harry Potter series author J.K. Rowling, who released The Cuckoo’s Calling under a pen name in order to distance it from her hugely successful children’s books.
Brick and mortar stores quickly ran out of hard copies and have been warned it may be two weeks or longer before more will be released, but the book is readily available in Kindle format. The New York Times is reporting that since the big Rowling reveal, the book has shot to the top of bestseller lists. From Amazon:
The Cuckoo’s Calling (4/5 stars, currently priced at $9.99)
The Cuckoo’s Calling is a 2013 crime fiction novel by J. K. Rowling, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
A brilliant mystery in a classic vein: Detective Cormoran Strike investigates a supermodel’s suicide.
After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.
Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.
You may think you know detectives, but you’ve never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you’ve never seen them under an investigation like this.