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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
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Read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Flavia de Luce: Book 1

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (2009) (edit title/settings)

by Alan C. Bradley (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

For very-nearly-eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, the discovery of a dead snipe on the doorstep of Buckshaw, the crumbling de Luce manor, was a marvellous mystery - especially since this particular snipe had a rather rare stamp neatly impaled on its beak. Even more astonishing was the effect of... read more

Summary edit see section history

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... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

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 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.” 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….

Characters edit see section history

Show all 18 characters
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Quotes edit see section history

  • “I gave her a partial smile and kept the rest of it for myself.”
    Flavia de Luce
  • “How I gloried in the antiquated names just waiting to be plucked from its pages: Butter of Antimony”
    Flavia de Luce
  • “On and on I went, my hands blackened with ink that had dried twenty years before I was born.”
    Flavia de Luce
  • “If there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as dearie. When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poison, and come to Cyanide, I am going to put under Uses the phrase Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one Dearie.”
    Flavia de Luce
  • “There are things which need to be known. And there are other things which need not be known.”
    Dogger
  • “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.”
    Flavia
  • “"I had more confessions walking in the door than Our Lady of Lourdes on a Saturday night."”
    Inspector Hewitt
  • “... there is something lacking in the de Luces: some chemical bond, or lack of it, that ties their tongues whenever they are threatened by affection.”
    Falvia
  • “I detected instantly that she didn't like me. It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her..............With a boy you never know if he's smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds.”
    Flavia
  • “Mediocrity, I discovered, was the great camouflage; the great protective coloring. Those boys who did not fail, yet did not excel, were left alone, free of the demands of the master who might wish to groom them for glory and of the school bully who might make them his scapegoat. That simple fact was the first great discovery of my life.”
    Father
  • “Once, when I remarked that she looked like a disoriented bandicoot, she leapt up from the piano bench and beat me within an inch of my life with a rolled up piano sonata by Schubert. Ophelia has no sense of humor.”
    Flavia
  • “I remembered a piece of sisterly advice, which Feely once gave Daffy and me:"If ever you're accosted by a man," she'd said, "kick him in the Casanovas and run like blue blazes!"Although it had sounded at the time like a useful bit of intelligence, the only problem was that I didn't know where the Cananovas were located.I'd have to think of something else.”
    Flavia de Luce
  • “"Steady on, Flave."”
    Flavia de Luce
  • “Simple pleasures are the best," he used to tell us.”
    Dr. Kissing, as to by Flavia's father
  • “I opened the book to the first page, which contained two stamps: one black, the other red. By the slight marks of gummy residue and the ruled lines, I could see that the page had once been filled. I turned to the next page... and the next. All that remained of the album was a gutted hulk: a sparse, ravaged thing that even a schoolboy might have hidden away in shame. "The cost, you see, of housing a beating heart. One disposes of one's life one little square at a time. Not much of it left, is there?" . . . . How Fate loves a jest," he went on in a half whisper.”
    Flavia and Dr. Kissing
  • “The retired Miss Mountjoy! I had heard tales about"Miss Mountjoy and the Reign of Terror." She had been Librarian-in-Chief of the Bishop's Lacey Free Library when Noah was a sailor. All sweetness on the outside, but on the inside, "The Palace of Malice." Or so I'd been told...The villagers still held novenas to pray she wouldn't come out of retirement.”
    Flavia
  • “I was me. I was Flavia! And I loved myself! Even if no one else did. All hail Flavia! Flavia forever! I shouted.”
    Flavia de Luce
  • “For the first little while, I'm usually entertained by my floaters, those wormy little strings of protein that swim to and fro across one's field of vision like dark little galaxies.”
    Flavia de Luce
  • “I visualized myself pulling on my mental thinking cap, jamming it down around my ears as I had taught myself to do. It was a tall, conical wizard's model covered with chemical equations and formulae, a cornucopia of ideas.”
    Flavia de Luce
Show all 19 quotes from this book

Setting & Locations edit see section history

  • Bishop's Lacey: A small English village, home of the de Luces.
  • Buckshaw: The de Luces' ancestral home.
  • Greyminster: The boarding school which Col. de Luce attended.

Organizations edit see section history

First Sentence edit see section history

It was as black in the closet as old blood.

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 1 of 5 in Flavia de Luce. (standard series)

Followed by The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag.

This book is in Amazon Book Club Picks. (authoritative list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Alan C. Bradley (Author)

Other Contributors:

  1. Catherine Leonardo (Designer)
  2. Joe Montgomery (Cover Artist)
  3. Jayne Entwistle (Narrator) - Random House Audio (April 28, 2009)
  4. Emilia Fox (Narrator) - Orion Publishing Group Limited (4 Feb 2010)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Orion
Country: Canada
Publication Date: January 22, 2009
ISBN: 9780752891934
Page Count: 304

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PR9199.4.B7324
  • Dewey: 813.6

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Masterpieces in Miniature: The Detectives
  • Poirot's Early Cases
  • Miss Marple
  • Belle Ruin

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