The Big Over Easy: A Nursery Crime by Jasper Fforde

Fiction: Dectective. Unabridged Audiobook from Penguin Audio and BBC Audiobooks America. Published in 2005. Recorded in 2005. Read by Simon Prebble. 11 hours and 43 minutes. Purchased from Audible.com

Jasper Fforde does an excellent job of combining humor and a detective story. This book is laugh out loud funny, especially if you are familiar with nursery rhymes. He does a good job of combining our world with the literary world. The plot twists kept me guessing - there was certainly no knowing from the start "who dunnit".

Publisher's summary:
It's Easter in Reading, a bad time for eggs, and no one can remember the last sunny day. 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. All the evidence points to his ex-wife, who has conveniently shot herself.

But Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his assistant Mary Mary remain unconvinced, a sentiment not shared with their superiors at the Reading Police Department, who are still smarting over their failure to convict the Three Pigs of murdering Mr. Wolff. Before long Jack and Mary find themselves grappling with a sinister plot involving cross-border money laundering, bullion smuggling, problems with beanstalks, titans seeking asylum, and the cut and thrust world of international chiropody.

And on top of all that, the JellyMan is coming to town.

The familiar and utterly transformed characters and world of nursery crime is pure ingenious fun. Just when you thought he'd stretched his astonishing imagination to the limit, Jasper Fforde does it again with this dazzling new series.

To view on amazon.co.uk, click here: The Big Over Easy
on amazon.com, click here: The Big Over Easy : A Nursery Crime
and on Audible.com, here: The Big Over Easy: A Nursery Crime