DETECTIVE INSPECTOR Jack Spratt, head of Reading police’s Nursery Crimes Division (NCD), is depressed. A jury has unexpectedly acquitted the three pigs of murdering Mr Wolff. The year before, the NCD had failed to get a conviction against the conmen who’d perpetrated the Emperor’s New Clothes scam. Worse, none of NCD’s recent cases had featured in the bestselling magazine Amazing Crime Stories, where coverage is the main mark of a police department’s success. A long time ago, Spratt (whose first wife, who could eat no lean, died young of her unhealthy diet) solved the murder of Cock Robin, but now the press ignore him and he can’t even qualify for the society for newsworthy detectives.

In Jasper Fforde’s The Big Over Easy (Hodder & Stough- ton, £12.99; offer £11.69) Spratt is given a new Official Sidekick, Detective Sergeant Mary Mary, and a crime is committed that could restore Spratt and NCD to fame and favour. The shattered body of Humperdinck (Humpty) van Dumpty, entrepreneur, millionaire and womaniser, is found at the bottom of a wall. It looks like a shooting — though, as the pathologist notes, there’s not been much research into the effect of bullets hitting big eggs. Solomon Grundy and Willie Winkie are among suspects.

I think you get the gist. Fforde offers a cascade of puns, plays on words, surrealism, satire and verbal virtuosity based on children’s rhymes and stories. Astonishingly, he stays funny for 400 pages (and this is only the first in the Nursery Crime Division trilogy). Even more amazingly, there’s a real plot there, a proper mystery with a surprise solution.

In Calling Out for You (Harvill, £10.99; offer £9.89) the Norwegian Karin Fossum proves again that she’s one of the very best of the new wave of Nordic crime writers. Plots are simple but her characters are deep, and she evokes brilliantly the claustrophobia of rural and small-town Norway.

The simple, lonely Gunder Jomann travelled to India to find a bride; Poona is soon to join him in his sleepy village. But on the day of his new wife’s arrival, Gunder’s much loved sister is critically injured in a car accident. He has to stay with her in hospital, and sends a taxi to fetch Poona from the airport. She isn’t there. Later, she’s seen in a café but soon afterwards her body is found, savagely beaten. The killer must be local. Inspector Sejer, one of the quieter, less anguished detectives in crime fiction, tries to penetrate the silence of the community.

Reginald Hill’s latest does not feature his detective duo Dalziell and Pascoe. That should not put you off. The Stranger House (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99; offer £11.69) is a mystery novel, but far more than that. It’s a gripping historical search, with helpings of religious conflict, mythology and the paranormal. In the gloomy, menacing Cumbrian village of Illthwaite, two strangers arrive. One, Sam Flood, a brash mathematician, seeks the truth about her grandmother’s cruel banishment to Australia in the Sixties. The other, a failed Catholic priest, Miguel Madero, is researching the fate of an ancestor. The eccentric villagers, faced with these unwelcome intruders, veer between unhelpful, threatening and violent. Hill is wonderful at portraying the links between a mysterious place and its inhabitants. Long-buried (at times literally) secrets start to emerge — of murders, torture and sexual deviancy, of betrayals and wretched families.

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