9780670033591

Detective Thursday Next has had her fill of her responsibilities as the Bellman in Jurisfiction. Packing up her son, Friday, Thursday returns to Swindon accompanied by none other than the dithering Danish prince Hamlet. But returning to SpecOps is no snap-as outlaw fictioneer Yorrick Kaine plots for absolute power, the return of Swindon's patron saint foretells doom, and if that isn't bad enough, back in the Book World The Merry Wives of Windsor is becoming entangled with Hamlet. Can Thursday find a Shakespeare clone to stop this hostile takeover? Can she vanquish Kaine and prevent the world from plunging into war? And, most important, will she ever find reliable childcare? Find out in this totally original, action-packed romp, sure to be another escapist thrill for Jasper Fforde's legion of fans. Book jacket.

Jasper Fforde is the author of The Well of Lost Plots, Lost in a Good Book, and The Eyre Affair, the first three books in the Thursday Next fantasy/detective series.

Author's Note

xv

Dramatis Personae

xvii

1. A Cretan Minotaur in Nebraska

1

(19)

2. No Place Like Home

20

(24)

3. Evade the Question Time

44

(13)

4. A Town Like Swindon

57

(15)

5. Ham(let) and Cheese

72

(10)

6. SpecOps

82

(8)

7. The Literary Detectives

90

(6)

8. Time Waits for No Man

96

(7)

9. Eradications Anonymous

103

(8)

10. Mrs. Tiggy-winkle

111

(6)

11. The Greatness of St. Zvlkx

117

(9)

12. Spike and Cindy

126

(6)

13. Milton

132

(1)

14. The Goliath Apologarium

133

(9)

15. Meeting the CEO

142

(9)

16. That Evening

151

(5)

17. Emperor Zhark

156

(6)

18. Emperor Zhark Again

162

(3)

19. Cloned Will Hunting

165

(11)

20. Chimeras and Neanderthals

176

(10)

21. Victory on the Victory

186

(5)

22. Roger Kapok

191

(8)

23. Granny Next

199

(3)

24. Home Again

202

(13)

25. Practical Difficulties Regarding Uneradications

215

(8)

26. Breakfast with Mycroft

223

(10)

27. Weird Shit on the M4

233

(12)

28. Dauntsey Services

245

(9)

29. The Cat Formerly Known as Cheshire

254

(10)

30. Neanderthal Nation

264

(9)

31. Planning Meeting

273

(7)

32. Area 21: The Elan

280

(8)

33. Shgakespeafe

288

(8)

34. St. Zvlkx and Cindy

296

(11)

35. What Thursday Did Next

307

(8)

36. Kaine v. Next

315

(10)

37. Before the Match

325

(12)

38. WCL SuperHoop-88

337

(11)

39. Sudden Death

348

(4)

40. Second First Person

352

(6)

41. Death Becomes Her

358

(7)

42. Explanations

365

(5)

43. Recovery

370

(5)

44. Final Curtain

375

(10)

Credits

385

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1. A Cretan Minotaur in Nebraska Jurisfiction is the name given to the policing agency inside books. Working with the intelligence-gathering capabilities of Text Grand Central, the many Prose Resource Operatives at Jurisfiction work tirelessly to maintain the continuity of the narrative within the pages of all the books ever written. Performing this sometimes thankless task, Jurisfiction agents live mostly on their wits as they attempt to reconcile the author?s original wishes and readers? expectations against a strict and largely pointless set of bureaucratic guidelines laid down by the Council of Genres. I headed Jurisfiction for over two years and was always astounded by the variety of the work: one day I might be attempting to coax the impossibly shy Darcy from the toilets, and the next I would be thwarting the Martians? latest attempt to invade Barnaby Rudge. It was challenging and full of bizarre twists. But when the peculiar and downright weird becomes commonplace, you begin to yearn for the banal. Thursday Next, The Jurisfiction Chronicles The Minotaur had been causing trouble far in excess of his literary importance?first by escaping from the fantasy-genre prison book Sword of the Zenobians, then by leading us on a merry chase across most of fiction and thwarting all attempts to recapture him. The mythological half-man, half-bull son of Queen Pasiphae of Crete had been sighted within Riders of the Purple Sage only a month after his escape. We were still keen on taking him alive at this point, so we had darted him with a small dose of slapstick. Theoretically, we needed only to track outbreaks of custard-pie-in-the-face routines and walking-into- lamppost gags within fiction to lead us to the cannibalistic man-beast. It was an experimental idea and, sadly, also a dismal failure. Aside from Lafeu?s celebrated mention of custard in All?s Well That Ends Well and the ludicrous four-wheeled-chaise sequence in Pickwick Papers, little was noticed. The slapstick either hadn?t been strong enough or had been diluted by the BookWorld?s natural disinclination to visual jokes.In any event we were still searching for him two years later in the western genre, amongst the cattle drives that the Minotaur found most relaxing. And it was for this reason that Commander Bradshaw and I arrived at the top of page 73 of an obscure pulp from the thirties entitled Death at Double-X Ranch. ?What do you think, old girl?? asked Bradshaw, whose pith helmet and safari suit were ideally suited to the hot Nebraskan summer. He was shorter than I by almost a head but led age-wise by four decades; his sun-dried skin and snowy white mustache were a legacy of his many years in colonial African fiction: He had been the lead character in the twenty-three ?Commander Bradshaw? novels, last published in 1932 and last read in 1963. Many characters in fiction define themselves by their popularity, but not Commander Bradshaw. Having spent an adventurous and entirely fictional life defending British East Africa against a host of unlikely foes and killing almost every animal it was possible to kill, he now enjoyed his retirement and was much in demand at Jurisfiction, where his fearlessness under fire and knowledge of the BookWorld made him one of the agency?s greatest assets. He was pointing at a weathered board that told us the small township not more than half a mile ahead hailed by the optimistic name of Providence and had a population of 2,387. I shielded my eyes against the sun and looked around. A carpet of sage stretched all the way to the mountains, less than five miles distant. The vegetation had a repetitive pattern that belied its fictional roots. The chaotic nature of the real world that gave us soft, undulating hills and random patterns of forest and hedges was replaced within fiction by a landscape that relied on ordered repetitions of the author?s initial descript

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Something Rotten

Something Rotten

0670033596

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