Got completely hooked by Robert Galbraith's murder mystery The Cuckoo Calling. Unputdownable - except when I had no choice. It seems it's the first in a series featuring the sleuth Cormoran Strike (great name) and his assistant Robin Ellacut, with whom he teams up in the opening pages. It's very derivative and formulaic in the best possible sense: a writer who knows how to tell a story and create characters that you can't help but root for (the good guys) or thoroughly detest (most everybody else.)
By the way, Galbraith is a pseudonym for the entirely wonderful J.K. Rowling. I was never an out and out Harry Potter fan, but I was a great admirer of the craft of the first three novels in the saga (which I read) and only gave up at number four (which I didn't) because of its length and my understanding that I wasn't the intended audience. But the Strike series is intended to appeal to me, or, rather, the side of me that loves a good story, especially a good murder.
(And also by the way, the word sleuth originally meant a track or trail, deriving from an Old Norse word. It then found itself transformed from its use in the term sleuth-hound, meaning a bloodhound that could track fugitives on a trail, into a term for a detective by our Yankee cousins.)
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