" "The Big Over Easy" is first and foremost a mystery novel, or at least a sendup of one. Most mysteries now-days have a "hook" - horse racing, mysteriously prescient cats, and catering, just to name a few - and "Over Easy's" is - as the series name implies - Nursery Rhymes. As in the author's "Thursday Next" series, the attempt is to create a world in which literature, with all its tropes and memes and plot devices, is literally true. The action takes place in a modern English town (Reading, to be specific) which has somehow become populated by a mix of ordinary human beings and PDR's - Persons of Dubious Reality; in other words, fairy tale characters such as the title victim, one Humperdink Van Dumpty, "Humpty" for short. The characters take this entirely for granted, but it doesn't bear taking to its logical conclusion or even examining too closely (Where do the fairy tale characters come from? How do they function in modern life? How can a 4 1/2 ft egg be an effective womanizer anyway? Etc.) Nevertheless, the author does pull off the story in an entertaining and engaging manner, with myriad amusing puns and "inside jokes" referencing various fairy tales and nursery rhymes. (Example: The investigating detective is Jack Spratt who has a pathological distaste for fat and who's first wife died of the opposite condition.)
My own personal opinion is that the book isn't quite as laugh-out-loud funny as the premise implies, but it grew on me as the mystery - a suitably complex one with several twists only some of which I anticipated - was played out. Worth a read by lovers of literature, puns, or mysteries. "
— Annette, 1/19/2014