When I mentioned Alan Bradley's novel The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Set in England in 1950, it's a murder mystery with a difference in that the sleuth is an eleven-year-old girl, Flavia de Luce. Flavia's eccentricities are endearing ones: she has a passion for chemistry (and a magnificent Victorian laboratory in which to indulge it), her bedroom pin-ups are the likes of Henry Cavendish and Robert Bunsen while her heroines include Marie Curie. The youngest of three motherless sisters, she is tough, resilient, highly resourceful, quick-witted and very smart, and she can give as good as she gets.
When she overhears her father the Colonel arguing with a visitor - the same man whose body is found just hours later in the cucumber patch - she sets out to discover what brought the stranger to Buckshaw, the rambling family home; when the Colonel becomes the prime suspect in the murder investigation, Flavia determines to find the real villain.
In a family where affection is limited by emotional restraint, nevertheless there are some tender moments amidst the verbal parrying, the illicit detective work and the sister-bating. "Think the Mitfords as imagined by Dorothy L. Sayers", said one of the judges who awarded this the CWA Debut Dagger, and they are absolutely right.
With bags of period detail, snappy dialogue, and a beautifully brisk, light tone, it adds up to a book of charm, interest and pace, which is above all a great deal of fun. I enjoyed it enormously (here in the UK it will be out next week, by the way) and I'm so glad that it is the first of a series - much more pleasure in store!
This sounds really good! I'm jotting this title down.
Posted by: Tara | 19 January 2009 at 07:13 PM