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Also by Alan Bradley:

The Golden Tresses of the Dead, February 2019
Hardcover / e-Book
The Grave\'s a Fine and Private Place, September 2018
Trade Size
The Grave\'s a Fine and Private Place, February 2018
Hardcover
Speaking from Among the Bones, February 2013
Hardcover / e-Book
A Study In Sherlock, October 2011
Hardcover / e-Book
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, May 2009
Hardcover

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Alan Bradley

Delacorte
May 2009
On Sale: April 28, 2009
384 pages
ISBN: 0385342306
EAN: 9780385342308
Hardcover
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Fiction

In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950—and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia’s family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. 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.”

To Flavia the investigation is the stuff of science: full of possibilities, contradictions, 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 and brazen 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 two distant deaths together, to examine new suspects, and begin a search that will lead her all the way to the King of England himself. Of this much the girl is sure: her father is innocent of murder—but protecting her and her sisters from something even worse….

An enthralling mystery, a piercing depiction of class and society, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a masterfully told tale of deceptions—and a rich literary delight.

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