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Summary
Summary
WINNER OF THE AGATHA * ARTHUR ELLIS * DILYS * DEBUT DAGGER AWARDS
"Wonderfully entertaining . . . sure to be one of the most loved mysteries of the year . . . [Flavia is] a delightful, intrepid, acid-tongued new heroine." --Chicago Sun-Times
It is the summer of 1950-and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath.
For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. "I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn't. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life."
BONUS: This edition contains a The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie discussion guide and an excerpt from Alan Bradley's The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag.
Author Notes
Alan Bradley was born in Toronto, Canada. He studied electronic engineering and worked at numerous radio and television stations in Ontario and at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University) in Toronto. Later, he became the Director of Television Engineering in the media centre at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, SK, where he remained for 25 years before taking early retirement to write in 1994.
He is the author of the Flavia de Luce Mystery series, all 6 of which have been New York Times bestsellers. In 2009 he won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. He also writes non-fiction books including The Shoebox Bible and Ms. Holmes of Baker Street.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
That keening voice you hear in THE SCARECROW (Little, Brown, $27.99) belongs to a Michael Connelly you may not know - not the best-selling author riding high on his 20th novel, but the newspaper guy who started out covering the crime beat for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and went on to become a top crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times. That voice was a lot cockier in "The Poet," the 1996 thriller in which Connelly introduced Jack McEvoy, a hotshot Denver newsman who parlays a much too personal encounter with a poetry-spouting serial killer into a best-selling book and a ride out of town to a bigger paper. Here, the voice is considerably more subdued and more than a little desperate, as Jack, who has just been pink-slipped at The Los Angeles Times, latches on to another psycho as his professional meal ticket, envisioning one last great story before The Times, if not the entire newspaper industry, goes down in flames./ Connelly, who has the nerve and timing of a whole SWAT team, gives Jack two weeks to find the creep who's been raping and killing attractive long-legged women and dumping their remains in car trunks - if his young replacement doesn't beat him to the story. But this ambitious upstart is too lovely and leggy for her own good, and the smart money's on Jack. To make the story sexier, Jack picks up a partner - Rachel Walling, the supersmart F.B.I. agent who jeopardized her career for him in "The Poet." These two follow the Internet trail of identity theft, pornography Web sites, electronic surveillance and industrial sabotage right to its source, a vast data processing and storage operation known as "the farm" and protected by a certain mastermind known as the Scarecrow./ But the damage done by this electronically savvy killer is nothing compared with the slaughter of the nation's newspapers, which Connelly compresses into the grim fight for life going on at The Los Angeles Times. Once "the best place in the world to work" but now "an intellectual ghost town," its ominously quiet newsroom is the harbinger of a time when there will be no eyes left to watch the nation or voices to sound an alarm. "In many ways," Jack says in his chilling requiem for the industry, "I was relieved that I would not be around to see it."/ Nancy Drew drives her own blue roadster. Harriet the Spy travels in a chauffeured limousine. Emma Graham, Martha Grimes's 12-year-old sleuth, takes taxis and trains. Flavia de Luce, the 11-year-old heroine of Alan Bradley's first mystery, THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE (Delacorte, $23), goes her way on a beat-up bicycle she calls Gladys, more independent and demonstrably naughtier than her literary sister-sleuths./ The neglected youngest daughter of a widower who never looks up from his precious stamp collection, Flavia takes refuge from her loneliness in the magnificent Victorian chemistry laboratory an ancestor installed at the family's estate in the English countryside. With "An Elementary Study of Chemistry" as her bible, the precocious child has become an expert in poisons - a nasty skill that gets her in trouble when she melts down a sister's pearls, but serves her well when a stranger turns up dead in the cucumber patch and her father is arrested for murder. Impressive as a sleuth and enchanting as a mad scientist ("What a jolly poison could be extracted from the jonquil"), Flavia is most endearing as a little girl who has learned how to amuse herself in a big lonely house./ If WHISPERS OF THE DEAD (Delacorte, $26) sends readers to Simon Beckett's fine previous mysteries, "The Chemistry of Death" and "Written in Bone," then justice will have been served. Maybe it's only a matter of crossed cultural wires, but David Hunter, the author's engaging British sleuth, fails to thrive when he pays a visit to the Forensic Anthropology Center ("the Body Farm") in Knoxville, Tenn., where he trained early in his career. While there, he's roped into looking for a creative serial killer who leaves the corpses of his tortured victims in incongruous settings./ Beckett handles the gruesome morgue chores with scrupulous scientific rigor, and his entomological knowledge of the feeding and breeding habits of maggots is awesome. But his crudely drawn American characters, so un-Southern in their rudeness, treat the eminent Dr. Hunter like dirt and seem to view his native Britain as some poky developing nation. "I'm sure you're well enough respected back home," one of them says, "but this is Tennessee." Well, not really./ Jack Liffey, the private investigator in John Shannon's mysteries, works the roughest territory in the genre - the subculture of the Southern California teenager. "I'm not really a detective," the big-hearted P.I. explains in PALOS VERDES BLUE (Pegasus, $25). "My practice is limited to looking for missing children." That doesn't begin to describe the harrowing rescue job he undertakes when he begins searching for a schoolgirl with a passionate commitment to protecting butterflies and other endangered species, including the illegal Mexican workers camping out on the cliffs above Lunada Bay. Unaware that his own impetuous teenage daughter is endangering herself by trying to help him, Liffey patiently excavates the area's social strata, uncovering layers of antagonism among the privileged rich and their anonymous day laborers, rival surfer gangs and a racist militia group prowling the hills - hostility that bounces right back at parents from their alienated children./ Michael Connelly's thriller features a savvy killer - and the slaughter of the newspaper industry./
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One It was as black in the closet as old blood. they had shoved me in and locked the door. I breathed heavily through my nose, fighting desperately to remain calm. I tried counting to ten on every intake of breath, and to eight as I released each one slowly into the darkness. Luckily for me, they had pulled the gag so tightly into my open mouth that my nostrils were left unobstructed, and I was able to draw in one slow lungful after another of the stale, musty air. I tried hooking my fingernails under the silk scarf that bound my hands behind me, but since I always bit them to the quick, there was nothing to catch. Jolly good luck then that I'd remembered to put my fingertips together, using them as ten firm little bases to press my palms apart as they had pulled the knots tight. Now I rotated my wrists, squeezing them together until I felt a bit of slack, using my thumbs to work the silk down until the knots were between my palms--then between my fingers. If they had been bright enough to think of tying my thumbs together, I should never have escaped. What utter morons they were. With my hands free at last, I made short work of the gag. Now for the door. But first, to be sure they were not lying in wait for me, I squatted and peered out through the keyhole at the attic. Thank heavens they had taken the key away with them. There was no one in sight; save for its perpetual tangle of shadows, junk, and sad bric-a-brac, the long attic was empty. The coast was clear. Reaching above my head at the back of the closet, I unscrewed one of the wire coat hooks from its mounting board. By sticking its curved wing into the keyhole and levering the other end, I was able to form an L-shaped hook which I poked into the depths of the ancient lock. A bit of judicious fishing and fiddling yielded a gratifying click. It was almost too easy. The door swung open and I was free. I skipped down the broad stone staircase into the hall, pausing at the door of the dining room just long enough to toss my pigtails back over my shoulders and into their regulation position. Father still insisted on dinner being served as the clock struck the hour and eaten at the massive oak refectory table, just as it had been when Mother was alive. "Ophelia and Daphne not down yet, Flavia?" he asked peevishly, looking up from the latest issue of The British Philatelist, which lay open beside his meat and potatoes. "I haven't seen them in ages," I said. It was true. I hadn't seen them--not since they had gagged and blindfolded me, then lugged me hog-tied up the attic stairs and locked me in the closet. Father glared at me over his spectacles for the statutory four seconds before he went back to mumbling over his sticky treasures. I shot him a broad smile, a smile wide enough to present him with a good view of the wire braces that caged my teeth. Although they gave me the look of a dirigible with the skin off, Father always liked being reminded that he was getting his money's worth. But this time he was too preoccupied to notice. I hoisted the lid off the Spode vegetable dish and, from the depths of its hand-painted butterflies and raspberries, spooned out a generous helping of peas. Using my knife as a ruler and my fork as a prod, I marshaled the peas so that they formed meticulous rows and columns across my plate: rank upon rank of little green spheres, spaced with a precision that would have delighted the heart of the most exacting Swiss watchmaker. Then, beginning at the bottom left, I speared the first pea with my fork and ate it. It was all Ophelia's fault. She was, after all, seventeen, and therefore expected to possess at least a modicum of the maturity she should come into as an adult. That she should gang up with Daphne, who was thirteen, simply wasn't fair. Their combined ages totalled thirty years. Thirty year Excerpted from The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
