24 Books to Pick Up This September

Just about everybody in the world knows that J.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, is the real identity of Robert Galbraith. That said, The Cuckoo's Calling deserves its own discussion. The novel gives us all the things we mystery lovers adore (the hard-boiled detective, the overly mysterious client, the young ingenue) all while commenting astutely on racial politics and celebrity culture—and telling a compulsively readable story. To wit: Cormoran Strike is an Afghanistan vet with one-and-a-half legs, a failing detective business and an imploded love life. He's just about to declare bankruptcy when an old schoolmate's brother walks into his office asking him to look into the death of his sister, the famous model Lula Landry. As a baby, Lula had been adopted by the schoolmate's aristocratic, white family, but never felt as if she belonged—leading her to search for her biracial, biological parents; and to depression. What Strike uncovers has as much to do with his own woes as hers and ties in nicely with one of the book's epigraphs from Virgil: "No stranger to trouble myself, I am learning to care for the unhappy." What results is a look at the age-old discrepancy between the glittery appearance of lives seen from afar (Rowling's included, no doubt) and the far dimmer, messier, all-too-human manner in which they are actually lived.