"A chilly light filled the interior of the tent. Two men were crouching beside the body, ready to move it, at last, into a body bag. Her head had bled a little into the snow. The face was crushed and swollen, one eye reduced to a pucker, the other showing as a sliver of dull white between distended lids. When the sequinned top she wore glittered in slight changes of light, it gave a disquieting impression of movement, as though she breathed again or was tensing muscles, ready to rise. The snow fell with soft fingertip plunks on the canvas overhead."

Perhaps it's down to those "soft fingertip plunks", but far as this crime scene is from your average escapade at Hogwarts, something about the writing in a new novel by Robert Galbraith alerted the more discerning readers in the crime writing fraternity to the fact that the author might not be who he claimed to be.

Or did it? By Sunday night, the blogosphere was jittering with speculation about the outing of internationally bestselling writer JK Rowling as the author behind The Cuckoo's Calling, which was published by Little, Brown in April.

The Sunday Times broke the story, explaining that it had investigated the book's provenance after noticing that the work was more accomplished than normal for a debut writer.

The New York Times reports that the story was set in motion on Thursday when a Sunday Times journalist tweeted that she had loved The Cuckoo's Calling, and that it did not seem to be the work of a novice. An anonymous response came back saying it wasn't a first-time novel, but was written by JK Rowling. The tweeter then deleted all their tweets and closed down their account. "All traces of this person had been taken off, and we couldn't find his name again," said the paper's arts editor, Richard Brooks.

Back in 2012 the Guardian's Alison Flood had wagered a proof copy of Harry Potter that JK Rowling's anticipated adult novel would be crime fiction after it went to Little, Brown editor David Shelley, who edits such crime authors as Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid, Carl Hiaasen and Mark Billingham.

McDermid and Billingham were among the writers who praised the book, though both deny having any knowledge of Rowling's authorship. On Twitter, @MarkBillingham said: "To be clear: those of us who blurbed "The Cuckoo's Calling" had no idea who Robert Galbraith was. We just loved the book."

After selling around 450 copies by early July, the novel shot up to No 1 on the Amazon bestseller chart after the announcement, and there was a run on bookshops. "About 1,500 copies [had been] sent out [to shops], just like for any novel by an unknown author," said Waterstones spokesman Jon Howells. "By the end of Sunday they were all gone."

Amazon's predicted waiting time for new orders is currently between five and nine days as the publisher rushes out a reprint, having managed the whole of the publishing process as if for a debut author. In the past, journalists have tapped printers for stories, and in the case of Harry Potter one even went undercover, taking a job at the printing press in an attempt to uncover the latest closely guarded plot.

"A debut novel would have a print run of 2,000 or 3,000, so if the publisher wanted to keep it quiet they would have stuck with that. But the clues are there – it was the same agent as JK and it ended up at the same editor," said Howells.

The timing of the revelation is certainly advantageous in sales terms; it's still in time for holiday book-buying and appears in a relatively benign market, with Dan Brown's Inferno now in its eighth week of sales and little competition from the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey, which dominated the charts last summer.

Howells said: "It will be up there challenging Dan Brown's Inferno for the position of bestselling novel of the year." The paperback of the Casual Vacancy, Rowling's first novel for adults, is also out on 18 July.