…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.
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