THE FLAVIA DE LUCE SERIES: THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE (#1); THE WEED THAT STRINGS THE HANGMAN'S BAG (#2); A RED HERRING WITHOUT MUSTARD (#3)

THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE (Flavia de Luce #1)
ALAN BRADLEY
Delacorte Press
$4.99 ebook editions, available now

ORIGINALLY REVIEWED ON LIBRARYTHING OCTOBER 2009

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.”

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: This delight is a debut mystery! A debut mystery, if you please, and a Crime Writers of America Dagger Award winner, and written by a Saskatooni writer, and just flat funny.

Whatever they do to the water in Saskatoon, they should do it to some Murrikin cities that're famous for nothing (eg, Dubuque or Terre Haute) so's they can make their mark on the cultural landscape. Bradley and Bidulka haling from the same city...what up with that?!

Flavia de Luce is an eleven-year-old chemistry prodigy, daughter of an extraordinary vanished mother and a reclusive abasent father, youngest of three sisters who are each at difficult ages. She's the most outgoing of the three, she's the most determined and organized and intellectually gifted of them, and alone among her family is not paralyzed by her upbringing. Her determination to prove her father innocent of a murder which takes place directly below her bedroom window is absolute and unshakable. She succeeds because she's a) smart b) stubborn and c) "just a girl" so unthreatening to anyone...except the murderer, who takes her very seriously indeed.

Flavia's dry-martini humor is old for her age, but she's presented from the get-go as old for her age in some very believable ways. Her intellectual capacities are also presented in such a way as to be part and parcel of a believable character. I like this book, it flew past me at a breezy 50mph and hooked me into its slipstream. I suspended disbelief the moment I met Flavia, and the author rewarded me with a very enjoyable afternoon. I'll read the next Flavia book, "Tied Up with Strings" (which I pray is only a working title, it's just gawdawful!) when it comes out from Bantam in 2010.

Go on, give it a try. You'll be surprised how easy it goes down!

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THE WEED THAT STRINGS THE HANGMAN'S BAG (Flavia de Luce #2)
ALAN BRADLEY
Delacorte Press
$4.99 ebook editions, available now

ORIGINALLY REVIEWED ON LIBRARYTHING JULY 2010.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From Dagger Award-winning and internationally bestselling author Alan Bradley comes this utterly beguiling mystery starring one of fiction's most remarkable sleuths: Flavia de Luce, a dangerously brilliant eleven-year-old with a passion for chemistry and a genius for solving murders. This time, Flavia finds herself untangling two deaths—separated by time but linked by the unlikeliest of threads.

Flavia thinks that her days of crime-solving in the bucolic English hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey are over—and then Rupert Porson has an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. The beloved puppeteer has had his own strings sizzled, but who’d do such a thing, and why? For Flavia, the questions are intriguing enough to make her put aside her chemistry experiments and schemes of vengeance against her insufferable big sisters. Astride Gladys, her trusty bicycle, Flavia sets out from the de Luces' crumbling family mansion in search of Bishop's Lacey's deadliest secrets.

Does the madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood know more than she’s letting on? What of the vicar's odd ministrations to the catatonic woman in the dovecote? Then there's a German pilot obsessed with the Brontë sisters, a reporachful spinster aunt, and even a box of poisoned chocolates. Most troubling of all is Porson’s assistant, the charming but erratic Nialla. All clues point toward a suspicious death years earlier and a case the local constables can’t solve—without Flavia’s help. But in getting so close to who’s secretly pulling the strings of this dance of death, has our precocious heroine finally gotten in way over her head?

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: These are cute, cute, cute books! I don't buy it, a kid being this kind of smart, but I don't care. The plot's a little on the thin side, but I don't care. The fun of these books is the delightful fantasy of Eng-er-land post-WWII seen through the eyes of eleven-year-old Flavia, daughter of decayed privilege.

The murdered man, a puppeteer/drug dealer, *richly* deserved killing, which always makes a mystery more fun for me. His relict, of sorts, is of course a suspect, but her Delicate Condition (which Flavia suspects, and confirms by a chemical test that I'd never heard of before) ends up eliminating her...and shortly after she is in the clear, she buggers off somewhere...but I suspect that she'll be back.

The murderer, when identified, made me smile. I was so hoping the guilty party would be who it turned out to be, since I took an instant and complete aversion to that person. Not always a reliable indicator of guilt, but in this case...! Yippee!

So why read this? Because it's fun. Because it's frothy. Because it's summer, and because it's worth a few hours of your time to escape your ordinary world for the exciting world of Flavia de Luce.

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A RED HERRING WITHOUT MUSTARD (Flavia de Luce #3)
ALAN BRADLEY
Delacorte Press
$4.99 ebook editions, available now

ORIGINALLY REVIEWED ON LIBRARYTHING DECEMBER 2011

Rating: 4.125* of five

The Publisher Says: Alan Bradley, author of the most award-winning series debut of any year, returns with another irresistible Flavia de Luce novel

In the hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey, the insidiously clever and unflappable eleven-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce had asked a Gypsy woman to tell her fortune—never expecting to later stumble across the poor soul, bludgeoned almost to death in the wee hours in her own caravan. Was this an act of retribution by those convinced that the soothsayer abducted a local child years ago? Certainly Flavia understands the bliss of settling scores; revenge is a delightful pastime when one has two odious older sisters.

But how could this crime be connected to the missing baby? As the red herrings pile up, Flavia must sort through clues fishy and foul to untangle dark deeds and dangerous secrets.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: Flavia de Luce of Buckshaw, Bishop's Lacey, is in it up to her neck again in this third outing of Alan Bradley's wildly popular series. This time she burns down a gypsy woman's fortune-telling tent, takes the woman home over her father's presumed objections, and then finds the lady bludgeoned almost to death in her caravan.

Next up is a meeting with the gypsy's semi-estanged granddaughter, deliciously yclept Porcelain, whose surprise presence in the crime-scene caravan causes Flavia to be assaulted and, subsequently, to invite the woman home with her. While escorting the younger gypsy into Buckshaw, her rambling, underheated Stately Home, Flavia espies a for-sure corpse dangling from Poseidon's trident. (That's one of Buckshaw's fountains, not the real Poseidon, of course.) It proves to be local ne'er-do-well and remittance man Brookie Harewood, last seen slouching about in Flavia's drawing room! Will the wonders never cease!

No, in fact, they won't, and Bradley spins a net for every red herring imaginable as Flavia encounters forgers, thieves, religious dissenters called Hobblers who baptize babies a la grecque (by dipping the little angels into running water by one heel), long-lost smelly men, reams of chemistry textbook stuff that manages not to make the reader's eyes roll back in their sockets,and murderers. Mustn't overlook the murderers.

One empathizes with Colonel de Luce, widower and soon-to-be bankrupt. He has a precocious daughter. Poor bastard.

Whatever else it is, this book is fun. It's just plain old-fashioned chuckle-inducing fun. It's a little ramshackle, what with the plot holes and all, and the behavioral improbability index starts high and never comes down, but so what? Flavia's chemistry fetish caused me to smirk a bit in the first book, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and her all-around precocity wasn't helping stuff. I found the Colonel to be an absurd character, someone directly from the Wodehouse Warehouse. There just isn't enough vitriol to heap on Flavia's horrid sisters, Ophelia and Daphne (Feely and Daffy to Flavia).

But here's the thing: Each of these characters is reported in Flavia's first-person, eleven-year-old perspective. Keep that in mind, and there is a sudden SNAP as the lenses in the optometrist's big, black machine fall into place: “Better now, or now?”

And that's when you should read these books: Now.
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