Most enjoyable - twists and turns like a detective novel should, and has the added charm of Fforde's literary bentness (ie, distinctively skewed tendency towards the literary)...it certainly adds another layer to the mounting revelations about the murdered individual when he is, in fact, Humpty Dumpty, a shady character much beloved-of the ladies with an unexpected philanthropic streak who, it seems, was shot and then fell to his death from a wall, on which he was accustomed to sit (including, as on the fatal night, in order to sleep off an excess of alchol consumption).
(Footcare product manufacturing empires feature heavily in the plot, by the way, as do nursery rhyme characters a-plenty.)
Jack Spratt (down at heel detective and family man; inadvertent recidivist giant killer) is a fun main character - almost a stock character but somehow not quite, and very easy to root for (Fforde shows his knack for writing despicable yet not overdone villains is intact in the transition from the Thursday Next series, too), and he's surrounded by an amusing supporting cast, not all of whom come fully to life but that's forgiveable with so much going on around them, and no doubt they'll be more fully sketched in the subsequent books in this sequence that I've not yet read. More please!
