The Third Pig Detective Agency is a children's novel about Harry Pigg, the lone survivor of the three little pigs' nursery rhyme, who is a gumshoe detective. He is called to action to find Aladdin's missing lamp and has a number of humorous, and at times, alarming encounters with goats, elves, and orcs. This book is aimed at the 9-12 year old camp, but as an adult I found this to be plenty entertaining. There are more than a few jokes aimed at the adult crowd, too. The author also lays the groundwork for a second novel about Harry Pigg.
I found this little book (149 pages of small-print text) marked as a children's book. presumably for ages 9-12, and fart jokes and gross situations indicate the book was aimed at young boys. Don't be fooled by the nursery-rhyme-inspired characters, however. The author has used every film-noir detective cliché he could think of to create a seedy atmosphere for his story. While the prose seems to be overly clichéd on purpose for humor's sake, I ceased to be amused by it after a chapter or two. Parents will find that the language is not too bad--although many will hesitate to give their fourth-grader a book in which a character tells another that "You suck." (By the way, US readers should know that "craic" has a different meaning in Great Britain than it does in the US.) As an adult, I found the story mildly entertaining--but not nearly as complex as Jasper Fforde's for-grown-ups-only series of Nursery Crime Detective books.
