Hedgehogs have declined very dramatically in numbers – to the point of being unknown, now, in many places where they snuffled in living memory. The declines in Hedgehog populations are of a similar scale to many of our largest declines in bird populations. It’s a bit surprising that even more hasn’t been made of the fact that this mammal has disappeared not just from large areas of farmland but also from many of our gardens and parks. Many people know from personal experience that they have lost their Hedgehogs who haven’t themselves seen the loss of Skylarks or Linnets out in the countryside. This book will help publicise the plight of Hedgehogs.
But maybe one reason why the Hedgehog population decline is not front of mind with many is that, as with all declining species, there are many competing ideas about why they have declined – and all of them may be true to some extent. For the Hedgehog, is it the motorist, the farmer, the Badger or maybe even the gardener who is the villain? Do we actually know the contributions of these different factors to the population decline? What are the key elements of a Hedgehog recovery plan?
This book is written wittily as a whodunnit trying to track down the responsible party and looking at the evidence. That’s a clever way to tackle the issue, and generally it works well and makes the book a different and gripping read.
If you turn to the last pages to find out who is the murderer then you’ll find a very good ending to the book which follows its good beginning and good middle. Given the genre, it is not appropriate to have a spoiler in this review, but you’ll find this more like Murder on the Orient Express than The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
If you liked the author’s Elegy for a River (as I did – see review here) then I’m sure you’ll enjoy this title too – it is, in my opinion, an even better book.
The cover? The cover is better than the title, I think. Is this a ghost story or a whodunnit? And, not that it matters hugely, the Hedgehog on the cover is not in a hedgerow. But I like the cover and I’d give it 9/10.
Ghosts in the Hedgerow: a hedgehog whodunnit by Tom Moorhouse is published by Doubleday.
Buy direct from Blackwell’s – a proper bookshop (and I’ll get a little bit of money from them)
I wonder if the reviewers who found the book”wonderfully entertaining” and “by turns hilarious” will feel the same when we are down to the last hedgehog and then suffering the same fate as the passenger pigeon and Eskimo curlew. Alan Wiseman in “The World Without Us” provides the answer for Tom Moorhouse and A Hedgehog Whodunnit “We Dunnitt” as we continue to eradicate species from the planet. Wiseman in Chapter One “A Lingering Scent of Eden-Bialowieza “forest primeval”. Oh yes please, complete with hedgehogs and no us.
The next cartoon in Private Eye (No.1597) characterising the book will depict the author holding the encased last hedgehog in a glass jar crying out did we get the DNA?