Rubric:

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 co-incidence 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 that this is going to be a tough case to crack...

SkyRider's comments:

My experience of humourous parodies of genre fiction is that either they are funny books covering weak plots or they are carefully woven plots with some jokes scattered on top. What makes this such a good book is that it works both ways; it's both funny and a good whodunnit but, what's more, the final denoument is utterly dependent on the universe the book is set in — it couldn't have come from another idea grafted on. I'm hoping that this turns out to be the start of a series...

RELEASE NOTES:

Love Jasper Fforde!