From the earliest pages, I knew this would be one of my favorite books this year. Cormoran and Robin land in a full sprint that made me want to keep pace with them throughout the four hundred-plus pages of the novel.

I won't summarize the plot here, but suffice it to say that as a postmodern detective yarn, The Cuckoo's Calling excels at threading several narrative hooks early on that will pull you through the book by the nose.

As I've said before, the lead characters are by far the book's highlight, and refreshingly they make it through the story without the tried and true romantic angles that have become so predictable in most fiction of this sort.

Basically, if you like crime fiction with hard done by investigators in a seedy world where few things are as they seem, The Cuckoo's Calling has you covered.