The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie - Alan Bradley

[goodreads]

Title: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Author: Alan Bradley
Genre: Crime, Historical fiction
Rating: 3/5
# pages: Audiobook ~10hrs
Date read: December, 2012

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.

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....

I'm typically not too interested in detective/sleuth type novels. They have to be something very out of the ordinary for me to be impressed (which is probably also why I've never cared for Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes), so it was with some trepidation that I started this audiobook. However, it came highly recommended, so I figured it was worth a shot.

And it was. It kept me nicely entertained for the 10'ish hours it lasted, and while I doubt I'll read any more books in the series, I did rather like Flavia de Luce... even if she wasn't a very believable 11-year-old.