Product Description

Jack Spratt and Mary Mary return in their second adventure from the inimitable Jasper Fforde

Five years ago, Viking introduced Jasper Fforde and his upsidedown, inside-out literary crime masterpieces. And as they move from Thursday Next to Jack Spratt’s Nursery Crimes, his audience is insatiable and growing. Now, with The Fourth Bear, Jack Spratt and Mary Mary take on their most dangerous case so far as a murderous cookie stalks the streets of Reading.

The Gingerbreadman—psychopath, sadist, genius, and killer—is on the loose. But it isn’t Jack Spratt’s case. He and Mary Mary have been demoted to Missing Persons following Jack’s poor judgment involving the poisoning of Mr. Bun the baker. Missing Persons looks like a boring assignment until a chance encounter leads them into the hunt for missing journalist Henrietta “Goldy” Hatchett, star reporter for The Daily Mole. Last to see her alive? The Three Bears, comfortably living out a life of rural solitude in Andersen’s wood.

But all is not what it seems. How could the bears’ porridge be at such disparate temperatures when they were poured at the same time? Why did Mr. and Mrs. Bear sleep in separate beds? Was there a fourth bear? And if there was, who was he, and why did he try to disguise Goldy’s death as a freak accident?

Jack answers all these questions and a few others besides, rescues Mary Mary from almost certain death, and finally meets the Fourth Bear and the Gingerbreadman face-to-face.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #263136 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 382 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Like The Big Over Easy (2005), Fforde's first Nursery Crime novel, this sequel offers literary allusions, confusions and gentle satire, though, again like its predecessor, it lacks the snap of the author's Thursday Next series (The Eyre Affair, etc.). Jack Spratt, DCI of the Nursery Crime Division of the Reading Police Department, is also a PDR (Person of Dubious Reality), as are most of the characters Jack deals with, including the Gingerbreadman, a notorious killer, and Punch and Judy, a violence prone couple who are also marriage counselors. An alien policeman named Ashley, talking bears, a devoted group of cucumber-growing enthusiasts and an immensely powerful company, Quang Tech, add spice. All are grist for Fforde, whose word play runs the gamut from puns to shaggy dog stories. The Gingerbreadman's on the loose, Goldilocks is missing and Jack's once again persona non grata at headquarters. As Jack and his associates "bring justice to the nursery world," they also cast a Swiftian eye on corporate hubris, race relations, the drug trade and myriad other targets. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
Jasper Fforde continues his tales of the Nursery Crime unit of the Reading Police Department, where Detectives Jack Spratt and Mary Mary investigate crimes involving fairy tale figures. With his perfectly clipped British accent, Simon Vance does his usual expert performance. In this case, he makes the improbable, unlikely, and downright ridiculous seem perfectly normal. It would be hard to imagine this novel without him. The plot includes the escape of the vicious serial killer the Gingerbreadman and the hunt for the missing gossip columnist, Goldy. Prime suspects are the Three Bears she was once involved with. But was there a fourth bear? Fforde is also known for his bestselling Thursday Next series. M.S. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Still on leave from his wildly inventive Thursday Next series (Something Rotten, 2004), Fforde offers a second entry in his wildly inventive Nursery Crime series (The Big Over Easy, 2005). The sadistic and superpowerful Gingerbreadman, nemesis of Jack Spratt, has escaped from St. Cerebellum's secure hospital for the criminally insane. Unfortunately, Spratt has been suspended pending psychological evaluation for his role in the Red Riding Hood fiasco. Though at first he resists doing "a plot device number twenty-six" and hunting for the Gingerbreadman on his own, eventually Spratt has no choice but to follow the rules of detective convention. All he and his mismatched team have to do is find the links between exploding extreme-cucumber-growers, a missing reporter nicknamed Goldilocks, a theme park called SommeWorld, and, oh yes, porridge dealers. Chockablock with puns, literary allusions, groanworthy asides, and playful dismantling of the police procedural--wearing its love for an almost-extinct form of children's literature like a tattoo--The Fourth Bear will appeal to fans of whimsy, silliness, or plain old nonsense. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Fforde follows up with another hit story.
Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and Detective Sergeant Mary Mary return in their second adventure by author Jasper Fforde, which builds off the events of "The Big Over Easy" while at the same time avoiding repeating the chief themes of that novel. Fforde has conjured up an elaborate fantastical world in this series of novels, and it is a delight to return to it (he has spoken of a third and final "Nursery Crime" story at some point in the future, which I highly anticipate).

Solving the murder of Humpty Dumpty made Jack Spratt famous, but, as the new book opens, he has fallen somewhat, thanks to a couple of botched operations, most notably his failure in the Red Riding Hood case, which left both Red and her grandmother catatonic. He is told to attend a psychiatric evaluation, which he fervently would rather avoid, even as a young reporter with golden hair turns up dead at a Battle of the Somme theme park ("Somme World", which is designed to mortify anyone who goes there), hours after she was discovered naked in bed at the Bruin household. Who killed Goldilocks, and why? Included here are, among other amusing details, the reasons why the story of the smallest bowl being 'just right' doesn't hold water, and what that indicates.

Fforde is not content to hit the same notes that made "The Big Over Easy" so entertaining, which some may see as a negative, depending on what you think about what he chooses to replace it with. The first novel made a great deal of the fictional unverse's obsession with 'true crime' stories, and the effect this had on police procedure, but this angle is more or less absent from "The Fourth Bear". There is no sense that the characters are spending their time trying to be more dramatic; Briggs, Jack's police captain, has seemingly gone from a self-aware parody of the trope where police captains are always suspending their officers to merely another example of that trope played straight (albeit with every referring to "Plot Device Number _" in reference to various strategies and situations they find themselves in). Playing the story a bit more straight adds a bit more straight-up drama to the story, though Fforde has not toned down his trademark irreverence one bit.

This approach also allows for some real exploration of the characters in a non-satirical context, and both Jack and Mary get a lot of good development here. Jack's concerns one of the intriguing new angles Fforde introduces here: a more thorough explanation of the existence of 'fictional' characters in the 'real' world, and how they differ from normal humans. Jack is a 'PDR' (Person of Dubious Reality), but seems to be fairly well-adjusted, while he is able to call out his psychiatrist on being a threadbare plot device who has no backstory or memories otuside what the author has supplied her with (which is emotionally devastating).

Fforde casts his net quite wide in terms of source material, reeling in not just Southey's characters but far more obscure ones such as Mr and Mrs. Punch (British puppets who I suspect non-Brits such as myself will find rather mystifying); and the entire mystery revolves around various figures from Edward Lear's "The Quangle Wangle's Hat", which I had never heard of before, but numerous important plot details are drawn from it (one might consider reading that poem before reading this).

All in all, another winner from Fforde.

Great fun to read!
The Fourth Bear, the second in Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime Series is even better than the first book, The Big Over Easy! I could not stop reading because I wanted to know who-dun-it. You definitely will not be able to guess the ending or how the story will come together in the last few pages. I love how Fforde sets up all his punny jokes so cleverly. I can't wait for the next book to come out!

"If I were a bear..."
Jasper Fforde is an ingenious crafter of puns, a weaver of stories completely fantastical yet grounded in some sort of reality that leave readers hungry for more. His second foray into the Nursery Crime Division is just as laugh-out-loud funny as the first book in the series, with a few literary twists befitting Thursday Next finding their way into the mix. "The Fourth Bear" is a quick-paced hilarious trip through the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Detective Chief Inspector Jack Spratt always manages to find himself in a pickle: he is lauded as the person responsible for capturing the Gingerbreadman, the most notorious serial killer in history, but infamous for messing up other cases, most recently that of Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother being swallowed by the wolf. When the Gingerbreadman escapes, Jack knows he is the only one who can capture the creature, but his boss takes him off the case, thinking he is too insane to perform his duties. He is sidetracked to a case about a missing journalist, Henrietta "Goldilocks" Hatchett, and his unorthodox investigation soon turns up a whole lot of questions but not many answers or connections. But Jack is certain that the whole "too hot, too cold, just right" theory indicates four bears, not three, and must find the evidence to prove his theory, and save his own life and the town of Reading.

"The Fourth Bear" is a showcase of Jasper Fforde's immense talent: each chapter is filled with puns and witty worldplay that any lover of literature will appreciate, especially the appearance of Dorian Gray. The plot is as convoluted as all of Fforde's works, yet he always manages to pull out a resolution that works to explain absolutely everything. Definitely "just right", "The Fourth Bear" will leave readers hungry and ready for the next case.