Alan Bradley

"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. 'I wish I could...

eleven-year-old amateur detective and ardent chemist Flavia de Luce is used to digging up clues, whether they?re found among the potions in her laboratory or between the pages of her insufferable sisters? diaries. What she is not accustomed to is digging up bodies. Upon the five-hundredth anniversary of St. Tancred?s death, the English hamlet of Bishop?s Lacey is busily preparing to open its patron saint?s tomb. Nobody is more excited to peek inside...

Banished! is how twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce laments her predicament when her father and Aunt Felicity ship her off to Miss Bodycote's Female Academy, the boarding school that her mother attended across the sea in Canada. Yet the sun has not yet risen on Flavia's first day in captivity when a gift lands at her feet. And Flavia being Flavia, a budding chemist and sleuth, that gift is a charred and mummified body which tumbles out of a bedroom chimney....

"Colonel de Luce, in desperate need of funds, rents his beloved estate of Buckshaw over to a film company. They will be shooting a movie over the Christmas holidays, filming scenes in the stately manse with a famous and reclusive star. She is widely despised, so it is to no one's surprise when she turns up murdered, strangled by a length of film from her own movies! With the snow raging outside and Buckshaw locked in, the house is full of suspects....

""The world's greatest adolescent British chemist/busybody/sleuth" (The Seattle Times), Flavia de Luce, returns in a twisty new mystery novel from award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Alan Bradley. In the wake of an unthinkable family tragedy, twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce is struggling to fill her empty days. For a needed escape, Dogger, the loyal family servant, suggests a boating trip for Flavia and her two older sisters. As their...