The Fourth Bear.

Jasper Fforde’s The Fourth Bear, the second book in his “Nursery Crimes” series and sequel to The Big Over Easy, is a typical Ffordian romp through an alternate universe populated by nursery-rhyme characters, aliens, and talking bears (indeed, the battle over whether they can carry weapons to protect themselves from hunters – the “right to arm bears” – is an ongoing theme in the book), full of wordplay and allusions to works of adult and children’s literature.

Jack Spratt, the head of the Reading police department’s Nursery Crimes unit, finds himself suspended before this case has even gotten underway, due to the unfortunate recent incident when Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother were both eaten by the Big Bad Wolf (both survived but have suffered psychological trauma), leaving him somewhat hampered in his efforts to track down what happened to Goldilocks. He’s not sure what this has to do with an explosion in a greenhouse that held a nearly fifty-kilogram cucumber. And he happens upon a porridge-trafficking scheme in the ursine community that may or may not be tied to some highly-placed officials.

The Fourth Bear has fewer out-and-out laughs than the books in the Thursday Next series, but it’s full of humor, both highbrow and silly. The cucumber storyline leads to a series of puns that I won’t repeat because they’d spoil a good chunk of the plot. Anything involving Ashley, the Rambosian alien whose native tongue is binary and who harbors a secret crush on his colleague Mary Mary, provides comedy value because of how literally he interprets everything he’s told and because of his odd fascinations with things like pirates, elephants, and 1970s television series. The characters occasionally break the fourth wall, observing the coincidences and plot clichés that Fforde employs to keep things moving. And there’s an allusion to Rebecca for those of you who miss the more highbrow references of the Thursday Next series.

Fforde’s storycraft has improved with each succeeding book, making The Fourth Bear a smoother read. As usual, three or four different storylines converge towards the end of the novel, but the way the cucumbers, Goldilocks, the porridge, the three bears, and a World War I-reenactment theme park come together was tighter than similar sequences in previous books, where it was harder to see how anything would come together until a few seconds before everything actually did. Fforde weaves the various investigations together, sometimes having them cross paths within the story and otherwise simply having Spratt and the DCI investigating multiple crimes at once, as opposed to his more standard method of jumping from one story to another. It makes for a tighter read, and it’s a style he should take back to the Thursday Next books, which just entered their second four-novel cycle.