***shameless self-promotion***
You can get my latest book, The Frog Prince’s Daughters, for only $1 until mid-August. After that, it still costs less than $4. And it’s DRM-free. Check it out.
***shameless self-promotion***
The first of a new six-book series set in early-1950s UK countryside and featuring nearly-eleven Flavia De Luce, our intrepid mystery-solving heroine, this is a nice book – as nice as a book featuring murder and blackmail can be, of course. Flavia overhears a bitter argument between her father and an unsavoury stranger. The next morning, the red-headed stranger is dead in the cucumbers, a slice of custard pie is missing, and Flavia’s father is about to be arrested for murder. That’s her cue to solve the murder herself.
This book won the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger award in 2007. In one way, I’m not surprised – Flavia is a great lead, young and therefore invisible, very clever, obsessed with chemistry, especially poisons, plotting against her older sisters with a sort of evil glee that is really endearing, and it’s she who carries the story, and it’s her no-doubt-to-be-explored-further relationships with her distant father, gardener Dogger and the Inspector who arrests her father which create the interest.
On the other hand, it’s really not that much of a murder-mystery. It’s a bit too easy to dismiss the too-few red herrings and figure logically who must have done it, and the general method used is obvious, so then you’re just waiting for Flavia to get information so you can know why it was done. For all her intelligence and big vocab, she is only eleven, so I found myself drumming my fingers on the armchair arm, waiting for her to catch up with me and ask the right questions of the right people.
In this sense, it’s a bit like the Ladies Detective Agency series which is also very popular despite not having particularly good mysteries. There, it is the sense of place and the characters that provide the charm, and it’s very much the case here too with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. Don’t read if you like a really meaty murder-mystery, do read if you like a fiesty young detective (thanks for making her a girl, Bradley, I’ll follow the next five in the series for that reason alone) in an idyllic UK village setting with a thin layer of darkness in a sponge-cake of niceness.
Here’s an interview with the author; I particularly like the bit where he talks about when he’s writing vs when Flavia’s writing.
Interested? Buy it from Fishpond.com.au All their prices are guaranteed better than Amazon.
