Quick Review: The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde

[jeriendhal]

Summary: DCI Jack Spratt, of the Reading police's not-exactly-elite Nursery Crimes division, is having a rough week. He's on forced sick leave after a botched attempt to nab the Big Bad Wolf resulted in Red Riding Hood and her grandmother being put in hysterical comas, the pro-anthropomorphic bear reporter Goldilocks has been mysteriously killed and the Gingerbread Man, England's most notorious mass murderer, is loose once again, ripping peoples' arms off and then breaking into their flats to put up wallpaper.

Oh, and Punch and Judy, the neighbors from hell, have just moved next to his family's house.

Review: Fforde's [1] novel, like Pratchett's Guards series, manages to hang together as a pretty funny comedy and decent police procedural as well. Assuming you can accept a procedural where fairy tales are not only real, but there's a thriving black-market to get around porridge rationing for bears (it's mildly addictive substance for them) and the "classic" 70's era Austin Allegro that Spratt buys at the beginning of the book is in mint condition only because of the portrait in the back which came with the car when it was sold to him by Dorian Gray.

Oh, and one the NCD's officers is an alien, but no one thinks much of that because they're rather boring people really.

Read it at least, buy it if you're a fan of oddball mysteries.

[1] Pronounced "Ford" oddly enough, not "Frreeep-boing-ratta-tatat-zip-pling-plunger-Ipswich Station-Zoing-pfft-Zaphod" as I almost expected.

Comments

[chewipaka.livejournal.com]

Did you read the Big Over Easy first?

And check out his Thursday Next series, and lots of things in the Nursery Crime series will begin to click into place, things that may have jumped out as being terribly odd and jarring on the first read.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I picked up TFB first, and I've got TBOE next on my listening queue. Which is probably for the best since from all reports the first book isn't as good. The Erye Affair is on reserve at my wife's library.

[chewipaka.livejournal.com]

I liked the Big Over Easy more, because it was my introduction to Jack Spratt's world, but I think that the Fourth Bear probably is the better written of the two.

And the Eyre Affair is better than both of 'em. IMO, at least. But those you definitely can't read out of order (my roommate tried and failed, hard).

[aynne-witch.livejournal.com]

sounds like i need to find these books