Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann

I am dying to read Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann. I've read something about it when it came out in Europe, but figured that it would be too hard to find in the US. This summer it got published in here and I was able to get a free copy.

I am going to Montreal for couple of days and Three Bags Full will be my reading material for the trip.

The premise of the book is that a flock of sheep has to solve a mystery. How adorable/original is this:

The sheep include the last flock of Cladoir sheep in Ireland, bred for wool (not for meat). Their beloved shepherd, George, a loner who the sheep realize has left his own "flock," reads to them every evening and has promised to take them to Europe. One morning, the sheep find George lying in the grass, "unusually cold and lifeless." They think he was done in by a wolf. But the cleverest among them, Miss Maple (a tip of the hat to Agatha Christie's Miss Marple), explains: "Even the most sophisticated wolves didn't drive spades through the bodies of their victims. For such a tool was undoubtedly sticking out of the shepherd's insides, which were now wet with dew."

Othello, the only black sheep in the flock, adds, "It can only have been a human who did it -- or a very large monkey" -- a reference to Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," in which the orangutan did it. Realizing it was murder, the sheep bleat for "justice."

The sheep are, of course, unreliable narrators. Their muddled notion of justice derives from a mystery novel George read to them but didn't finish because it was too upsetting. Their understanding of relationships between men and women is based on the romance novels George read them. They overhear a priest say "The Lord is my shepherd" and become convinced that "the Lord" is the butcher, the last person on earth that they'd want for their shepherd, smelling as he does of death.