Author J.K. Rowling faced immense pressure and anticipation for her first book after the Harry Potter series, the adult-geared novel The Casual Vacancy.  The novel was about as far away from Harry Potter as you could get, and some readers found themselves disappointed with the finished product.  For her next effort, Rowling opted to do away with the scrutiny by writing under a pseudonym.  She penned the first installment in a new crime detective series, The Cuckoo’s Calling, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, but her ruse didn’t last long as she was outed as the true author shortly after the book’s release.  No matter, The Cuckoo’s Calling is a fantastically engrossing detective novel revolving around the somewhat prickly private investigator Cormoran Strike, and Rowling’s second Cormoran Strike book, The Silkworm, is quite possibly even better.

Given that the material is great and Rowling’s name brings a hefty amount of brand recognition to her works, a Cuckoo’s Calling TV show is now in development from the folks over at BBC One.  More after the jump.

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Per Deadline, BBC One has commissioned a Cuckoo’s Calling TV show adaptation that will be produced by Brontë Film and TV, the same outfit behind the BBC adaptation of Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy.  It’s still early days, but Rowling will collaborate on the Cormoran Strike series.  The number and length of episodes is still being worked out.

With Strike, Rowling has created a new character that is incredibly fascinating, multi-faceted, and somewhat impossibly charming.  Strike is an Afghanistan war veteran with only one client at his waning business, a drinking habit, and a penchant for solving mysteries despite his somewhat rough exterior.  When we first meet the character in Cuckoo’s Calling, he’s just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and reluctantly enlists an eager, successful woman named Robin as his temporary secretary.

The first novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, finds Strike (and also Robin) investigating whether the supermodel’s death was a murder or a suicide, while the second novel, The Silkworm, revolves around the case of a missing author and a damning manuscript.

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of actor BBC One sets to fill the role of Strike—I always envisioned Ray Stevenson in my head when reading.  The three-episode The Casual Vacancy miniseries is set to debut in February on BBC One with an HBO airing to follow.  Rowling most recently penned the screenplay for the upcoming Harry Potter spinoff film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Read the synopsis for The Cuckoo’s Calling below:

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.

You may think you know detectives, but you've never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you've never seen them under an investigation like this.

Introducing Cormoran Strike, this is the acclaimed first crime novel by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. [BN.com]