The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"If there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as "dearie". When I write my Mangum Opus, A Treatsie Upon All Poisons, and come to 'Cyanide', I am going to put under 'Uses' the phrase" Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one"Dearie'."

-Flavia de Luce-

Flavia, eleven and the youngest of three sisters, discovers a body in the cucumber patch at her family's estate. Buckshaw in the town Bishop's Lacey. Just before he dies he utters the word "Vale". Precocious and wise beyond her years, Flavia does not tell all to the police and is determined to solve the murder herself.

It is the summer of 1950 and at the once grand mansion of Buchshaw, Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intriged by a series of inexlicable 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 a mystery begins. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins when muder 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."

To Flavia, the ivestigation is the stuff of science: full of possibilities, contadictions, and connections. Soon her father, a man raising his three daughters alone, is seized, accused of murder. And in a police cell, during a violent thunderstorm, Colonel de Luce tells his daughter an astounding story-of a schoolboy friendship turned ugly, of a priceless object that vanished in a bizarre act of thievery of a Latin teacher who flung himself to his death from the school's tower thirty years before. Now Flavia is armed with more than enough knowledge to tie the two deaths together, to examine new suspects, and begin a search that will lead her all the way to the King of England himself. And to prove her father's innocence.

This book was so much fun and has an interesting story behind it. The author was 70 years old when he wrote it. There are currently 3 more books in the series. I loved this book because it was from a different point of view and was a book I could recommend to anyone without fear of offending.

My rating 4/5 stars