It takes a certain kind of fanciful reader to appreciate
Jasper Fforde. The British writer sets his novels in alternative
universes and showers them with literary allusions and plays on words.
He became known for a series featuring a detective named Thursday Next.
Set in an alternative England where literature is more important than
in our own world, the books blur the line between fiction and reality,
allowing characters to jump in and out of novels.
The Big Over Easy is the first
book in another series featuring Detective Inspector Jack Spratt in the
Nursery Crime Division in Reading, England, where ordinary humans,
characters from nursery rhymes, aliens, and anthropomorphized animals
live together. The Nursery Crime Division is at the bottom of the
police totem pole and threatened with elimination after a series of
failures to convict, so Jack and and his assistant, Sergeant Mary Mary,
want a winner. Humpty Dumpty has been murdered. Jack and Mary have to
fight off the underhanded attempts of the star detective, a publicity
hound, to grab the case as they go about investigating the many
suspects. One delightful thing about the book is that it works as a
real detective story even as Fforde spoofs the whodunit genre.
The second book in the Nursery Crime series, The Fourth Bear (2007), focuses on
Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
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