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A wonderful, priceless book, full of wit and philosophical musings and profound observations.

One morning at the small village of Glennkill, Ireland, a small flock of sheep wake up to find that their shepherd, George Glenn, has been murdered. With a spade through his guts. Miss Maple, the cleverest sheep in Glennkill, decides they should investigate and find his murderer, because even though George was a bit of a peculiar and irrascible bastard, he was still their shepherd, and who would read "Pamela novels" (romances) to them now?

So begins an interesting week of discoveries, where through the sheep's observations and investigations we learn about the townsfolk, and that some odd things were going on, and that there are mysteries beneath the mysteries. The sheep too have their own secrets, and fears, as well. Perceptions aren't static - as we learn more about George you can't help but become fond of the man, and I like his style of shepherding! Gabriel, another shepherd whom the sheep always admired, turns out to be less than worthy of their admiration. Bible-thumping Beth, as George always called her, isn't so straight-forward either.

The sheep themselves have delightful personalities, and although Swann's descriptions of raising sheep don't always coincide with my own knowledge from growing up on a sheep farm, a lot of the mannerisms and peculiarities were very familiar and often had me laughing out loud. There's Othello, a black ram with four horns who was once in a circus (part of a knife-throwing act that left him scarred); Maude and her incredible sense of smell; Sir Ritchfield, the lead ram, who's mostly deaf but still has good eyesight; Mopple the Whale, who can remember everything; Lane, the fastest sheep in the flock; and Zora, who has a ledge above the cliff from where she gazes out over the "abyss" and watches the cloud sheep.

Because the sheep have an almost childlike and very logical way of observing humans and their behaviour, it's often very humorous and also profound. The nice thing about this novel is that, aside from the sheep's ability to understand human speech and to ponder human matters, they haven't actually been anthropomorphised - they're still very much sheep, not sheep behaving like humans. Equally hilarious are the humans' perceptions of the sheep and their behaviour, which the story manages to convey with great comic timing. Using the sheep also enables clues to turn in on themselves, or be obscured until the sheep figure something out, and so on, which really keeps the detective side of the story humming along nicely.

I don't usually read crime novels of any kind, especially the generic kind, but this one I could happily re-read and notice more each time. Knowing the "whodunnit" side of things doesn't spoil it at all, because Three Bags Full is so much more than a detective story.