Mostly Murders

“You shouldn’t believe what you don’t understand. You should understand what you believe.”

Have you ever wondered what sheep think about when they’re peacefully grazing? In Three Bags Full, the answer is both a lot and not very much at all.

Sheep, it turns out, are in fact very different. Especially the sheep in George’s flock. Miss Maple is the smartest sheep in the sleepy Irish village of Glennkill. Othello the ram has seen (some of) the outside world, as he originally came from a circus, and Mopple the Whale, who is always hungry, remembers everything he has ever heard. A lot of the other sheep are just sheep, and their thoughts are very much as one would suspect, centred on grass, food and not much else.

But when the sheep come across a dead human shepherd, Miss Maple suspects foul play, like in the detective novel George once read to them. Granted, he only read about half the book before he threw it away, but that half still piqued Miss Maple’s brain enough for her to insist that the sheep must investigate the clearly suspicious death. Under her leadership, the sheep poke and prod at the truth and ponder two- and four-legged concepts like justice, God, flock mentality and cloud sheep.

If you prefer stories that are firmly rooted in reality or murder mysteries brimming with complex alibis and timelines, this is probably not the book for you. If you appreciate understated humour and stories told from very alternative perspectives, I highly recommend giving this one a go. It is a quirky, witty, tongue-in-cheek mystery celebrating the woolpower of sheep and marvelling at the strangeness of human nature seen from a woolly, anthropomorphic point of view.

Cozy mystery