Series: Nursery Crime #1
Published: 2006
Publisher: Hodder
Format: Paperback
Pages: 398
Rating: ★★★★
It’s Easter in Reading – a bad time for eggs – and the shattered, tuxedo-clad corpse of local businessman Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty III has been found lying beneath a wall in a shabby part of town. Humpty was one of life’s good guys – so who would want him knocked off? And is it a coincidence that his ex-wife has just met with a sticky end down at the local biscuit factory? A hardened cop on the mean streets of the Thames Valley’s most dangerous precinct, DI Jack Spratt has seen it all, and something tells him this is going to be a tough case to crack…
Punny funny murder mystery; if I had to describe this book, those four words sum it up to a tee. Fforde is known for his funny and ingenuitive concepts, and his even funnier writing style, he combines fun children’s characters with puns-a-plenty with the seriousness of a murder case – an oxymoron of a book if ever there was one.
The characters were based around nursery rhyme characters for the most part, and all but one of them I found, extracted a personality very well from their very own piece of poetry or prose. There were little things spotted around the story which related to the supposed nursery rhymes; the forgetting of Rumpelstiltzkin’s name or Jack trading in a painting of a cow for some magical beans being a couple of examples. This wasn’t a hilarious book as such, but one that made you inwardly laugh at the irony of it all, which made it very subtly clever. There were definitive ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters in this book and this was primarily obvious from the start, we loved the good guys and despised the bad guys and this flowed quite nicely with the nursery theme.
The crunch of the book was the crime solving element, and although it had funny quips surrounding the main action it was still a serious affair and this came across in the writing. There was a genuine crime to be solved, it didn’t just end after a couple of people being questioned, it was a full on police investigation with clues, red herrings and the odd lie or few. I was certainly intrigued to finish the book and see who had committed the crime, as I can honestly say that I had no clue and was going along with the investigations and felt as though I was figuring it out for myself with Jack Spratt and Mary Mary by my side which is a wonderful element I love in books. It wasn’t predictable in the slightest and it didn’t even get boring, as when it started to slow, something would come in and throw everything up in the air again and they would have to pick up the pieces.
This is the second Jasper Fforde book that I have read, I loved ‘Shades of Grey’ and I can most certainly say that that wasn’t a fluke as this one was fabulous and I will most definitely be reading an array of his books in the future.
Oh! Cakey Creativity 