Reviews & Overviews by Rod Cameron

        
The Big Over Easy Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde has written four excellent books about Thursday Next, so purchasing his latest work was a no-brainer. The Thursday Next Books – The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten are a completely original genre and concern Thursday’s adventures literally within literature, where she has to track down various villains who are trying to alter particular works of fiction to their own ends. Not only are these books very different and very clever, but they are also quite amusing.
Although The Big Over Easy is set in the same “universe” as the earlier books, and is written in a similar style, there is no mention of Thursday Next. We have the pleasure of meeting D.I. Jack Spratt and his assistant Mary Mary who work in the Nursery Crimes Division of the Reading Police Department. The plot is on the face of it fairly simple, as summarised on the cover of the book. “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. Evidence points to his ex-wife who has met with an accident down at the Yummy-Time biscuit factory.”
Things are never as straightforward as they first seem however, and before long “Jack and Mary find themselves grappling with a sinister cross-border money laundering, bullion smuggling, problems with beanstalks, titans seeking asylum and the cut and thrust of international chiropody.”
This is a wonderful, light-hearted book. On one level it can be taken as a satire on detective novels, but this is a well crafted novel that hangs together seamlessly. If you have not tried the Thursday Next books (why not?) then give this one a go. If you have, then why haven’t you read this already? The good news is that we can expect the return of Jack Spratt and Mary Mary in the Fourth Bear, which is presumably a take on the Goldilocks Caper. If you cannot wait for the sequels, then extras such as deleted scenes and out takes from all five books are available on
www.nurserycrime.co.uk.

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Date: 2005
Pages: 403 Pages
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 0-340-83567-2
Format: Hardback
Reviewed by: Rod Cameron
Date Reviewed: January 2006

Copyright : Roderick Alasdair Cameron 2001 - 2012                   rod@rodcameron.co.uk

Copyright : Roderick Alasdair Cameron 2001 - 2015                   rod@rodcameron.co.uk

Copyright : Roderick Alasdair Cameron 2001 - 2015                   rod@rodcameron.co.uk