This book introduces Cormoran Strike, an ex-Army, Special Investigations Division officer who lost his leg to an IED in Afghanistan, and his temporary, soon-to-be-permanent secretary Robin Ellacott. It is the first of seven Cormoran Strike novels written by J. K Rowling under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. Strike, who has allowed himself to become overweight and out of shape, has just had a disastrous breakup with his rich, sadistic girlfriend Charlotte Campbell. Robin has just become engaged to an accountant who doesn’t like her working for a private investigator.
Strike is hired by John Bristow, adoptive son of Sir Alec and Lady Yvette Bristow, to investigate the death of his sister, another adoptee of the Bristows. Lula Landry was a black supermodel who fell from her third-story apartment several months earlier, and the police have ruled her death a suicide. Strike interviews the people in Lula’s world of haute couture, drug dealers and users, and hangers-on. He is aided by the astute and resourceful Robin, who gains entrée for him and is not above occasional impersonation and story-spinning.
Suspects abound, beginning with Lula’s boyfriend Evan Duffield, a drugger who seems to be one of those people who is famous for being famous—but Evan has a good alibi. Lula’s downstairs neighbor, the philandering film producer Freddy Bestigui, is another suspect. So is Tony Landry, Lula’s uncle.
Strike has to work through several sub-mysteries before he can solve the big one. Freddy’s wife Tansy Bestigui, hysterical after she saw Lula fall and insisting she heard a man arguing with Lula just before her death, could not have heard anything inside her soundproof apartment. And Lula was researching her birth parents in the months before her death. She found her birth mother, but who was her father, and how does he figure in her last days? Moreover, there are security tapes of two men running from the area of Lula’s apartment shortly after her death. Who are they, are they connected with her death, and why does one of them have on a sweatshirt created by Lula’s designer friend Guy Somé?
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