I just finished reading Alan Bradley's very entertaining mystery, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Doubleday, 2008. It won the 2007 Debut Daggers Award from the British Crime Writers Association, well-deserved, I think; it's an engaging, literate, novel.
Mr. Bradley's sleuth is eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters of a reclusive and eccentric widower; her mother has been dead since her birth. The book is populated with all sorts of the usual English village eccentrics, but each has his or her original pecularities. This is not the usual English village cosy mystery.
Among Flavia's hobbies is the study of chemistry, which comes in handy when an Inspector (wrongly of course) arrests her father for the murder of an old school friend. Woven into the mystery is her father's boyhood study of magic, and some other magicians pop up along the way. Indeed, magic figures into the solution of the mystery, which is set in the England of 1950.
The author's writing is elegant and fast-paced, and I didn't spot the killer until about a quarter of the way from the end, but I still kept reading because the characters are so interesting. The only false note, frankly, is Flavia herself. She's just too sophisticated for an eleven-year-old. Since the book is written in the first person, we really get quite a dose of her and she's a lot to take. I'd put her actual age more at fourteen or fifteen; that would square with her intellectual, emotional and psychological age as well.
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