In this, the third Flavia de Luce mystery (after The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, both of which I read and liked last May ), we once again find ourselves in the little village of Bishop’s Lacey, which is again beset by mysterious criminal happenings. First a Gypsy woman is attacked in her caravan, and then a local poacher turns up dead: are the crimes related to each other, or to another unsolved crime in the village’s past, or to other criminal doings in the village’s present? Eleven-year-old Flavia, as usual, sets about to figure it all out. Flavia is a pretty endearing narrator, with her pluck and smarts and love of chemistry: the below might be my favorite sentences in the whole book.
As two cups of water came to the boil in a glass beaker, I took down from the shelf where it was kept, alphabetically, between the arsenic and the cyanide, an apothecary jar marked Camellia sinensis.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s only tea.” (154)
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