This week I bring you a different type of mystery.  Ok a mystery is a mystery, but this mystery by Jasper Fforde features many nursery rhyme characters, in fact one of the detectives is Jack Spratt.  In this installment (the first in the series), Humpty Dumpty has been murdered.

From the dust jacket:

In The Big Over Easy, Fforde takes a break from classic literature and tumbles into the seedy underbelly of nursery crime.

Meet Detective Inspector Jack Spratt, family man and head of the Nursery Crime Division, long suffering under the shadow of the flashy Detective Friedland Chymes with his astonishing number of published cases in Amazing Crime Stories.  Spratt is fresh from a spectacular failure to see convicted three wily pigs for the murder of a certain wolf.  The media and tide of public opinion are set squarely against him.  Now, new trouble is brewing.

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 Dumpty, minor baronet, lover of women, ex-convict, and former millionaire philanthropist, is found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. Yes, the big egg is down.  All those brittle pieces sitting in the morgue point to foul play.  Spratt and his new partner, Sergeant Mary Mary, search through Humpty’s sordid and secretive past in  hopes of finding the key to his death.  Immersed in a case that reaches into the highest echelons of Reading society and business, Spratt is walking the tightrope of his career.  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….

I had to share this image as well, it is from the back cover of the dust jacket