This being a book for 8 to 12 year-olds, the sleuthing is going to typically fall to an 8 to 12 year-old, and the economy and intelligence with which Gibbs isolates 12 year-old Teddy Fitzroy is actually very impressive. And when an autopsy by the park’s chief vet uncovers a canny method of murder, the police swing into action and are swift to track the killer down… It’s not as if hippos are pleasant animals at the best of times (“In the wild, they’ve been known to stomp lions to death and bite crocodiles in half.”), but it still comes as a surprise to the park staff in general when Henry is found floating belly-up in his enclosure. Alas, as part of the publicity drive ahead of the park’s opening - and before Brutus had been acquired and renamed - the public had already decided that ‘Henry’ should be the mascot, and so FunJungle was stuck with him, and almost everyone hated him more on this account. …and terrifying violence, and was unfortunately fond of spraying watching crowds with faeces (a way of asserting dominance in the wild, apparently). In Los Angeles, where they tended to psychoanalyze things a bit too much, one keeper had accused Brutus of giving the female he was paired with “a devastating case of low self esteem”. “For a hippopotamus, he had a lot of enemies” - having hospitalised various keepers at the four zoos who successively palmed him off, Brutus (as he was originally called) had also been a damp squib where mating was concerned, veering between aloofness…

See, if ever there was a character who was being set up as the victim of a future, er, hippocide, it’s Henry, the real life inspiration for the mascot of billionaire J.J. However, the brilliance of Gibbs’ endeavour here is how much he adheres to the fundamental form of the murder mystery despite this core difference. “Can you call it homicide if the victim is a hippo?” asks the back cover of this first entry in Stuart Gibbs’ FunJungle series and, from a purely Latin perspective, no you can’t.

The rooster grisham