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BOOK
DESCRIPTION: A
delightfully dark English mystery, featuring
precocious young sleuth Flavia de Luce and her
eccentric family.
The summer of 1950 hasn’t offered up anything out of
the ordinary for eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce:
bicycle explorations around the village, keeping tabs
on her neighbours, relentless battles with her older
sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, and brewing up poisonous
concoctions while plotting revenge in their home’s
abandoned Victorian chemistry lab, which Flavia has
claimed for her own.
But then a series of mysterious events gets Flavia’s
attention: A dead bird is found on the doormat, a
postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. A
mysterious late-night visitor argues with her aloof
father, Colonel de Luce, behind closed doors. And in
the early morning Flavia finds a red-headed stranger
lying in the cucumber patch and watches him take his
dying breath. For Flavia, the summer 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.”
Did the stranger die of poisoning? There was a
piece missing from Mrs. Mullet’s custard pie, and
none of the de Luces would have dared to eat the awful
thing. Or could he have been killed by the family’s
loyal handyman, Dogger… or by the Colonel himself!
At that moment, Flavia commits herself to solving the
crime — even if it means keeping information from
the village police, in order to protect her family.
But then her father confesses to the crime, for the
same reason, and it’s up to Flavia to free him of
suspicion. Only she has the ingenuity to follow the
clues that reveal the victim’s identity, and a
conspiracy that reaches back into the de Luces’
murky past.
A thoroughly entertaining romp of a novel, The
Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is inventive
and quick-witted, with tongue-in-cheek humour that
transcends the macabre seriousness of its subject.
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