A Flavia de Luce Novel
by Alan Bradley
370 pages
Bantam Books, 2009
fiction
Read in 6 days
Another Review...
My Rating: ★★★★
"It was as black in the closet as old blood."
Review: As mysteries go, I read authors such as Jonathan Kellerman & Sue Grafton. If I want to go into truly classic mystery writers I have read Agatha Christie & Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But never have I come across a character like Flavia who I truly enjoyed getting to know. She is a young lady who you wouldn't think should be solving a murder faster than the police but her mind is quick on its feet and her way of putting clues together is simple enough for the reader to follow yet complex enough to actually make sense! Aside from the mystery she must solve in order to vindicate her father who is accused of the murder, she also has to contend with her older sisters who are, for lack of better words, flaky and immature.
Her humor and wit is rather mature for her age but that never came as a surprise to me seeing as she loves to read and is fascinated by the mysterious, especially things of a chemical and poisonous variety.
As I've said, the mystery is easy to follow and paced well. I do hate a mystery that takes forever to get to the meat and bones of it! I look forward to continuing to read the other books in this ongoing series. And IF it should ever be made into a televised mystery series I think the BBC would definitely have a hit on their hands! ::hint hint::
Summary: 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.”
To learn more about Alan Bradley, visit his website here.
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