Description:" It’s Easter in Reading—a bad time for eggs—and no one can remember the last sunny day. Ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty III, minor baronet, ex-convict, and former millionaire philanthropist, is found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. All the evidence points to his ex-wife, who has conveniently shot herself.
But Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his assistant Mary Mary remain unconvinced, a sentiment not shared with their superiors at the Reading Police Department, who are still smarting over their failure to convict the Three Pigs of murdering Mr. Wolff. Before long Jack and Mary find themselves grappling with a sinister plot involving cross-border money laundering, bullion smuggling, problems with beanstalks, titans seeking asylum, and the cut and thrust world of international chiropody.
And on top of all that, the JellyMan is coming to town . . . "My thoughts:
Like the Thursday Next series, Jasper Fforde has again interwoven fiction with everyday life - in this case, nursery rhymes with police procedures - plus a dig at mystery fiction in general. I especially liked the newspaper reports at the beginnings of each chapter as well as the solemn way the familiar nursery stories were treated by the Nursery Crime Division.
Date finished: 12/31/2006
Rating: 3* = good
ISBN-10: 0670034231
ISBN-13: 978-0670034239
Publisher: Viking Adult
No. of pages: 400
Binding: Hardcover
2 comments:
I was a bit disappointed when I read this initially. The second book, The Fourth Bear, was very good though!
Thanks for the comment. I'm looking forward to reading The Fourth Bear someday!
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