It's a Mystery Book Club selection

  For its December 5^th meeting, It’s a Mystery Book club has selected the Dagger Award winning “The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie” by Alan Bradley.  This 1^st in the Canadian author’s series features the precocious 11 year old Flavia de Luce, chemist and sleuth in training.  She has such a forceful personality her as yet unnamed character hijacked the story in another novel Bradley had been writing and thus a new book and series was born.

  “The Sweetness …” begins in the summer of 1950 with  a series of inexplicable , yet intriguing events which have struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia’s family calls home. A dead bird  is found on the doorstep with a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak and,hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him take 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.”

   If you have not been an audio book reader/listener before, hearing Jayne Entwistle  narrate the 5 book series is a treat.  She sounds exactly as you might imagine the 11 year Flavia with great inflection, humor and, of course, an English accent.   Entwistle has won multiple AudioFile  Earphones awards for her delightful performance and will continue in “The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches” to be released January 14, 2014.