The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

In this book, Alan Bradley introduces 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. To Flavia the investigation is the stuff of science -- full of possibilities, contradictions, and connections. Soon her father is seized, accused of murder. And in a police cell, 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, 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.