Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith

Over the years, Rowling often spoke of writing a crime novel. In 2007, during the Edinburgh Book Festival, author Ian Rankin claimed that his wife spotted Rowling “scribbling away” at a detective novel in a café. Rankin later retracted the story, claiming it was a joke, but the rumour persisted, with a report in 2012 in The Guardian speculating that Rowling’s next book would be a crime novel. In an interview with Stephen Fry in 2005, Rowling claimed that she would much prefer to write any subsequent books under a pseudonym, but she conceded to Jeremy Paxman in 2003 that if she did, the press would probably “find out in seconds”.

In April 2013, Little Brown published The Cuckoo’s Calling, the purported début novel of author Robert Galbraith, who the publisher described as “a former plainclothes Royal Military Police investigator who had left in 2003 to work in the civilian security industry”. The novel, a detective story in which private investigator Cormoran Strike unravels the supposed suicide of a supermodel, sold 1,500 copies in hardback (although the matter was not resolved as of 21 July 2013; later reports stated that this number is the number of copies that were printed for the first run, while the sales total was closer to 500) and received acclaim from other crime writers and critics — a Publishers Weekly review called the book a “stellar debut”, while the Library Journal’s mystery section pronounced the novel “the debut of the month”.

The books in suggested reading order:

1 – The Cuckoo’s Calling
2 – The Silkworm
3 – Career of Evil