This is the first of (hopefully) many more Flavia de Luce mystery books to come. Flavia is an adorable and spunky eleven-year-old sleuth who has a passion for chemistry, specifically poisons. Unlike her sisters Feely and Daffy, she devotes all her time studying them in her own laboratory. But when she finds a dead bird with an orange stamp on its beak, and soon after finds a dead man in her backyard, she must hurry and find the culprit. A brilliant simple mystery infused with enough charm, humor and suspense to keep me asking for more!
'It was as black in the closet as old blood. They have shoved me in and locked the door. I breathed heavily through my nose, fighting desperately to remain calm.'(opening lines)
'What intrigued me more than anything was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation -- all of it! -- was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was real stability.'(10)
'It was a bird, a jack snipe -- and it was dead. It lay on its back on the doorstep, its stiff wings extended like a little pterodactyl, its eyes rather unpleasantly filmed over, the long black needle of its bill pointing straight up into the air. Something impaled upon it shifted in the morning breeze -- a tiny scrap of paper. Not a scrap of paper, a postage stamp.'(15)
'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.'(29)
'As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No... eight days a week.'(57-58)
'I brought to mind the image of the stranger lying there in the first light of dawn; the slight growth of whiskers on his chin, strands of his red hair shifting gently on the faint stirrings of the morning breeze, the pallor, the extended leg, the quivering fingers, that last, sucking breath. And the word, blown into my face ... "Vale."'(77)
'It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl liked her. Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off. With a boy you never know whether he's smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals...'(85)
'Except for a handkerchief-scarf of grass at one side, Miss Mountjoy's willow filled the fenced-in yard. Even on the doorstep I could feel the dampness of the place: the tree's languid branches formed a green bell jar through which little light seemed to penetrate, giving me the odd sensation of being under water. Vivid green mosses made a stone sponge of the doorstep, and water stains stretched their sad and black fingers across the face of the orange plaster.'(136)
'... there are questions which need to be asked, and there are questions which need not be asked.'(142)
'It was downhill all the way, and I made good speed. When I backpedaled, the Sturmey-Archer three-speed hub on Glady's rear wheel gave off a noise like a den of enraged, vernon-dripping rattlesnakes. I pretended they were right there behind me, striking at my heels. It was glorious! I hadn't felt in such fine form since the day I first produced, by successive extraction and evaporation, a synthetic curare from the bog arum in the Vicar's lily pond.'(156)
'Here we are, Father and I , shut up in a plain little room, and for the first time in my life having something that might pass for a conversation. We were talking to one another almost like adults; almost like one human being to another; almost like father and daughter. And even though I couldn't think of anything to say, I felt myself wanting to go on and on until the last star blinked out.'(191)
'Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie,
Who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?'(223)
'Whenever one comes face-to-face with a killer in a novel or in a cinema, his opening words are always fripping with menace, and often from Shakespeare.'(302)
'It was a lie and I detected it at once. As an accomplished fibber myself, I spotted the telltale signs of an untruth before they were halfway out of his mouth: the excessive detail, the offhand delivery, and the wrapping-up of it all in casual chitchat.'(304)
a Delacorte Press Book, May 2009
370 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
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