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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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