Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

Lost in a Good Book (2002) (Hodder)
Jasper Fforde
Grade: B+
Genre: fiction / crime / alternate reality
Source: own
Thursday Next: (1) The Eyre Affair, (2) Lost in a Good Book, (3) The Well of Lost Plots

Fiction RBC 2014: The second book in a series 

Having just married the man of her dreams (after a very lengthy estrangement) and concluded the biggest case of her career as an operative in the Literary Detectives division (rescuing the fate of Jane Eyre from the hands of criminal mastermind Acheron), Thursday Next is ready for a little less excitement in her life. Adventure, however, is more than happy to find her and turn Thursday’s life inconveniently upside-down.

In a puzzling string of events, it becomes clear that Landon, Thursday’s newly-wed husband of just four weeks, drowned as a toddler thirty-eight years ago and no one other than Thursday has any memory of history being otherwise. The threatening Goliath corporation wants Thursday to rescue their operative Jack Schitt from the poem in which she’d trapped him, and are willing to go to any lengths to fulfil their goals. Thursday begins a mission to discover the truth while evading interviews and the press, trying to keep out of Goliath's clutches and going on a series of new literary adventures ...

I need to read this series faster: I read The Eyre Affair in 2011 and LIAGB in September of this year, despite owning the series for some time. I’ve decided that one of my Reading Bingo Challenges for 2015 will be a TBC-themed, requiring me to read books that have been on my to be read list for months, if not years. One category will be a Jasper Fforde title, namely book 3 in this series: The Well of Lost Plots.

I said in my review of The Eyre Affair just how strange and wonderful this series is and how much I love it. The Eyre Affair could be read as a standalone just fine and in not reading book two, I treated it as a standalone for all that time. However, Thursday’s enemies, namely the Goliath corporation, have a grudge against Thursday that goes deeper than one book. Again, we can only read and watch with unadultered glee at this car-wreck waiting to happen.

You never know quite what to expect next with Jasper Fforde, and that’s part of the appeal. As a literary detective, Thursday’s division isn’t particularly sexy or desirable but she likes her job – until it starts getting so life-threatening, of course. Jasper Fforde manages to combine just the right amounts of action, crime, intrigue, witty dialogue and harrowing drama to create a world that you just won’t forget. 

Image courtesy of Book Depository.