The Chemistry of Mystery

Take an eleven-year-old aspiring chemist, a bird with a stamp impaled on its beak, and a red-haired stranger gasping his last words in the family cucumber patch, and what do you have?  You have Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, a sparkling debut mystery by C. Alan Bradley.  Flavia de Luce loves nothing more than experimenting in her home laboratory, but one early morning she stumbles over a body in the garden.  Her reaction?   “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.”  Her father’s arrest for murder is the catalyst for her own investigation, one that is adventurous, unpredictable, and wickedly clever.