Is her father the murderer? And how did this guy die anyway? The police give her the brush-off, of course, but she’s determined to find out the details on her own.

She only is able to eavesdrop on part of the conversation before her father’s hired hand whisks her back off to her own room, but the next morning, when she’s in the garden, she discovers a dying man, who whispers one last strange word before he stops breathing.įlavia is more startled than horrified and she is certain the dead man is the one she overheard talking with her father the night before. Then, when she gets up in the middle of the night to investigate some odd sounds, she hears some strange man threatening her father. As if that weren’t odd enough, her father seems to be completely thrown by the appearance of this bird, far more than seems normal.

Life is fairly average until the morning she opens the kitchen door to find a dead jacksnipe (a large bird) on the doorstep with a regular British postage stamp stuck through it’s beak. She’s happy to tinker around in her make-shift lab and explore the surrounding areas on her own. Her mother died years earlier and her father is a bit disengaged, so the girls are mainly on their own, a fact which doesn’t seem to bother Flavia much. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradleyįlavia is the narrator, an eleven-year-old chemist, who mainly uses her scientific knowledge to get revenge on her two older and somewhat-unkind sisters. I am not all that bright, people.Īfter that, it really picked up for me and I thoroughly enjoyed the story. I finally had to check out a physical copy of the book and reread the first 50 pages so I could follow the story line. I started listening to The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie on my iPod and I could not really keep track of all the characters or, frankly, even what was going on. 8 of 10: It took me a while to warm up to The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, especially with the audio version, but I ended up really enjoying this murder mystery with its incredibly precocious narrator.

Book sweetness at the bottom of the pie