I’ve been organizing my eBooks onto shelves by subject, something I had been putting off for a few years. I just realized how many eBooks I have that I bought, read on a plane or something, and forgot about. Somehow it’s easier to do that with e- as opposed to p-books. When real books are on real bookshelves, it’s pretty easy to spot what you’re looking for and, when you’re standing in front of the shelves at 1 a.m. like standing in front of an open refrigerator, you can quickly spot something you enjoyed reading to read again.* On e- (unless you’re traveling a lot on business which I have not been recently), it’s much easier to forget about books you read and enjoyed.

Except this book.

This book is awesome.

I was introduced to this book while my job still included visiting bookstores. The managers knew they could recommend almost anything and I’d buy it, and this one came from a bookseller recommendation.

“It’s a mystery,” he said. “The detectives are sheep.”

“Okay, that sounds weird, I’ll bite.”

This is why it’s so easy to discover new books in bookstores but it’s so hard to discover them online.

This book is a delight. The fun begins almost immediately, when the sheep come across their shepherd’s lifeless body and complement themselves on remaining calm. (Unlike the sheep I’ve met.) He wasn’t a great shepherd (always comparing his sheep to Norway sheep) but he did read to them occasionally and they feel they owe it to him to find out who killed him. So baaing “Justice!” they determine to find the murderer. And their shepherd’s missing dog.

But they are hampered by the fact that they are sheep. They are easily distracted and a little unsure about what to do without their shepherd. And the murderer was clearly another human (although one sheep, who had lived for awhile in a zoo, proposes an alternate theory, quickly dismissed). And humans are strange. The sheep view them through their own perspective: the butcher is scary and untrustworthy; when the body is discovered by a human and a herd of humans comes running, the human in the lead is perceived as the bellwether.** T

The sheep use their special senses – they seem to smell human emotions – and they quickly pick up interpersonal dynamics. Although they don’t always get the reasons for those dynamics right, with hilarious results. And they are distracted by sheep politics and by internal monologues that define each sheep’s personality while also giving you a window into how sheep perceive the world.

Despite the confounding mysteries of the human mind, and the fact that sheep think like – well – sheep, these sheep do a great job figuring out who killed their shepherd. And why.

The solution is a bit of shock, to us and to the sheep.

Swann’s ability to put herself within a sheep’s frame of reference is brilliant. It’s what takes this book to another level. If you want a fun mystery that’s a little quirky, I highly recommend this one.

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^{*Except when you live in a home without enough bookshelves and all your mass market mysteries are double-stacked and I had to take off a whole shelf of Carter Dickson to find my Amelia Peabody last night in the almost-dark because my husband was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake him up but I needed to read Amelia Peabody right then. Not that she deserved to be hidden behind Carter Dickson – or would put up with it if books were people – it just ended up like that.}

^{**Bellwether. Another book I have around here somewhere that needs to be read again. Let me see, I think it’s behind… Born of a Woman or maybe A Series of Unfortunate Events… I need another rainy day when my husband is out of town so I can take everything off the shelves and put it back on again so I know where everything is. Although with Connie Willis books, you can never be quite sure where – or when – they are. Darn historians.}