Name: The Cuckoo's Calling
ISBN: 9781408703991

The Cuckoo's Calling

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, thelegendary 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.

What Hacker News says

ec109685May 2018

> J.K. Rowling published a book called The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pen name Robert Galbraith only to be outed by someone performing advanced text analysis with a computer.

That is highly misleading. She was outed by a person with inside knowledge (anonymous tip), which was confirmed by automated text analysis.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-comput...

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ksherlockNov 2015

Counterpoint: The Cuckoo's Calling, by Robert Galbraith, sold 500 copies. The Cuckoo's Calling, by JK Rowling, sold a 100,000+ copies.

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ig1Mar 2014

The Cuckoo's Calling was identified as being Rowling's work due to the fact her lawyer leaked it, the fact this analyst is claiming credit for it (but is carefully worded to allow for multiple readings) doesn't give me a lot of confidence in their ability.

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jdludlowJul 2013

The headline sounds like the guy was analyzing texts in general and came up with this match; a needle in the haystack thing.

The story is less interesting. An anonymous Twitter tip said, "Hey I think that J.K. Rowling wrote The Cuckoo's Calling." The result of running it through the software was: yeah, she probably did.

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jmdukeJul 2013

While I agree with the central premise of the cumulative advantage, I think comparing literary success to commercial success is kind of tricky, especially given the niche position of modern crime novels. The audience for crime novels is much smaller than the audience for young adult fantasy novels; I'm relatively sure A Cuckoo's Calling was selling very well for its genre before Rowlinggate.

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