The Fourth Bear

By Jasper Fforde

Jack Spratt, who eats no fat, is a detective and in charge of the Nursery Crime Division in Berkshire, a community filled with escapees from fiction and especially from nursery rhymes. Spratt is in trouble with his superiors due to a couple of flawed investigations (he, Red Ridinghood & her granny were all eaten by the big, bad wolf, which isn't as fatal as it sounds) and he is put on leave. Meanwhile a homicidal goodie, the Gingerbreadman, has escaped from the mental hospital and is on a murderous spree. Spratt, operating without official sanction, is investigating the death of Goldilocks and incidentally becomes involved with the Gingerbreadman case and the exploding cucumber gardeners case. These cases also tie in with the smuggling of the forbidden foodstuffs (porridge, honey, marmalade and buns) to the local talking bear population. Somehow, with the help of his colleagues, Mary Mary and Ashley, an ET type alien, Spratt will tie it all together and save his job in the process.

If you are going to read Fforde's fiction, you have to be willing to suspend your disbelief. If you can, you will probably enjoy this novel. I somewhat enjoyed it, when it wasn't irritating me. I didn't like the way the characters know and comment on the fact they are in a novel. I didn't care for the way bears are portrayed. I found the idea that bears get high on porridge and the other controlled foodstuffs just plain stupid. Many of the jokes in this novel are lame puns, as the writer himself admits. Still, as a detective novel, it was pretty good, except I would like to point out that if cake is immersed in water it also falls apart, which means that the whole cookie vs cake thing is still open to question.

For another review of The Fourth Bear, see USA Today.

New Word
Nobbblers: To nobble is to filch or steal. "Prong's champion might have grown even larger were it not for the attentions of a gang of murderous cucumber nobblers who destroyed the cucumber two days after the record was officially set, an attack that tragically cost Prong his life."