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Winner of the 2007 Offense Writers’ Relationship Debut Dagger
A delightfully dark English mystery, presenting precocious young sleuth Flavia de Luce and her eccentric family.
The summertime of 1950 hasn’t offered up anything unusual for eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce: bike explorations surrounding the village, monitoring her neighbours, relentless fights with her aged sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, and brewing up poisonous concoctions while plotting revenge in their home’s deserted Victorian chemistry lab, which Flavia has said on her behalf own.
But then a series of strange events gets Flavia’s attention: A useless bird is available on the doormat, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. A strange late-night visitor argues with her aloof dad, Colonel de Luce, nowadays. And in the early morning Flavia discovers a red-headed stranger laying in the cucumber patch and pieces him take his dying breathing. For Flavia, the summer commences in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw: “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was the most interesting thing that possessed ever happened certainly to me in my entire life.”
Do the stranger pass away of poisoning? There was a part lacking from Mrs. Mullet’s custard pie, and none of them of the de Luces would have dared to eat the dreadful thing. Or could he have been killed by the family’s faithful handyman, Dogger… or by the Colonel himself! At that moment, Flavia commits herself to resolving the crime — even if this means keeping information from the village police, to be able to safeguard her family. But her dad 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 check out the signs that reveal the sufferer’s individuality, and a conspiracy that reaches back to the de Luces’ murky former.
A thoroughly amusing romp of any book, 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 matter.
From the Hardcover edition.
