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Fiction Cozy

The Grave's a Fine and Private Place

A Flavia de Luce Mystery

by (author) Alan Bradley

Publisher
Doubleday Canada
Initial publish date
Jan 2019
Category
Cozy, Historical, Amateur Sleuth
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780385678469
    Publish Date
    Jan 2019
    List Price
    $19.95

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Description

Poison expert, deductive genius and lovable busybody Flavia de Luce returns, wending her way down a river and straight into a twisty mystery that may just send her to an early grave.

In the wake of family tragedy, twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce finds herself facing a summer with a lot of time on her hands and not much to do. When Dogger, the loyal family servant, suggests a boating trip for Flavia and her reluctant sisters, Flavia obliges. Travelling down the river, she contemplates the recent spate of murders by a church vicar who poisoned three of his female parishioners with cyanide. But when Flavia dips a languid hand in the river, her thoughts are halted when her fingers grasp something. Expecting to have a hold on a fish, the river instead yields Flavia a dead corpse--much to her delight. What better way to while away the time than to solve a juicy mystery (or two)?
But the case seems to involve a motley cast of suspects. After all, what could connect the son of an executed killer, a far too canny police constable, a travelling circus, and the publican's mysteriously talented wife? As she works to find answers, Flavia will need to keep her wits about her, or risk falling into a watery grave of her own.

About the author

Contributor Notes

ALAN BRADLEY was born in Toronto, Ont. and grew up in Cobourg, Ont. After a long career in television broadcasting, he took early retirement from the University of Saskatchewan to write full-time. He has published many children's stories as well as lifestyle and arts columns in Canadian newspapers. His adult stories have been broadcast on CBC Radio and published in various literary journals. He has also written several screenplays and taught university-level courses in screenwriting. He was the recipient of the first Saskatchewan Writers Guild Award for Children's Literature. His Flavia de Luce series continues to be a New York Times bestseller and has been published in thirty-nine countries and thirty-six languages. After writing for several years on the Maltese island of Gozo, Alan Bradley now lives on the Isle of Man.

Excerpt: The Grave's a Fine and Private Place: A Flavia de Luce Mystery (by (author) Alan Bradley)

•One•

I am on my deathbed.

Again.

Although I have done everything in my power to survive, it has not been enough. A human being can only bear so much.

I turn my face to the wall in bitter remembrance.

Father had died suddenly at Christmas, leaving a colossal vacuum which we quickly realized would never—­could never—­be filled. In some strange way, he had been the secret glue which held us all together, and with his passing my sisters and I, never friends at the best of times, had now—­and quite inexplicably—­become the most deadly of mortal enemies. Each of us, wanting desperately to be in charge—­to gain some control over her shattered life—­found herself at odds with the others at every turn. Words and crockery were thrown with equal carelessness. It didn’t seem to matter much who was hit.

With our family on the verge of breaking up, Aunt Felicity had come down from London to sort us out.

Or so she claimed.

In case we had forgotten it, we were quickly reminded of the fact that our dear auntie was—­as the Book of Common Prayer so charitably puts it—­a woman who followed the devices and desires of her own heart.

In short, she was at best a stubborn old woman and at worst a bully and a tyrant.

Buckshaw was to be sold at once, Aunt Felicity insisted, even though in law it was mine to do with as I pleased. Feely was to be married off to her fiancé, Dieter Schrantz, with all haste—­or at least as quickly as possible—­as soon as a respectable period of mourning had been observed.

Daffy would be sent up to Oxford to read English.

“Who knows but that, given time, you might even become a gifted teacher,” Aunt Felicity had said, upon which Daffy had thrown her teacup and saucer into the fireplace and stormed out of the room.

Tantrums were useless, Aunt Felicity had told us icily. Tantrums solve no problems, but only create new ones.

As for me, I was to be taken up to London, along with my cousin Undine, to live with Aunt Felicity until she could decide what to do with us. In my case, I knew that meant sending me somewhere to continue those studies which had been interrupted when I was chucked out of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, in Canada.

But what of Dogger and Mrs. Mullet? What would become of them?

“They shall be paid off and each given a small pension in proportion to their years of service,” Aunt Felicity had decreed. “And I’m sure they will both be very grateful.”

Dogger fobbed off with a pension? It was unthinkable. Dogger had given us almost his entire life: first to my father, then to my mother, and later to my sisters and myself.

I pictured him sitting on a quaint wooden bench by a river somewhere, dressed in a rough-­spun pensioner’s jacket, forced to beg bread from the passing tourists, who took occasional snapshots of him to send home to their cretinous relatives.

Dogger deserved better than that.

And Mrs. Mullet?

Left to cook for total strangers, she would languish and die, and we would be responsible.

Our lives were looking exceedingly grim.

Then, at the beginning of February, to make matters worse, King George had died: King George VI, that lovely man who once sat and chatted so happily with me in our drawing room as if I were his own daughter; and with his passing, the entire nation—­indeed all of the Commonwealth countries, perhaps even the whole world—­joined in the shock and sadness of our own recent bereavement.

And what of me? What of Flavia de Luce?

I would perish, I decided.

Rather than submit to a lifetime locked in some dismal pigeon-­infested London square with an aunt who valued the Union Jack more than her own blood, I would simply do away with myself.

And as an authority on poisons, I knew precisely how to accomplish it.

No cyanide for me, thank you!

I knew the symptoms all too well: the vertigo, the dizziness, the burning in the throat and stomach and, as the vagus nerve becomes paralyzed, the difficulty in breathing, the cold sweat, the feeble pulse, the muscular paralysis, the crushing heaviness of the heart, the slobbering . . .

I think it was the slobbering, more than anything, that put me off the cyanide. What self-­respecting young woman would want to be found dead in her bedroom drowned in her own drool?

There were easier ways of joining the Heavenly Choir.

And so, here I am on my deathbed, all warm and cozy, my half-­closed eyes moving slowly for the last time across that ghastly red-­clotted mustard-­yellow wallpaper.

I shall simply fall asleep and they will never find so much as a trace of what it was that did me in. How clever of me to have hit upon it!

They’ll be sorry, I thought. They’ll all be sorry.

But no! I mustn’t let it end like that. Mustn’t let it end with such a commonplace expression. That was the kind of platitude milkmaids died with—­or match girls.

The death of Flavia de Luce demanded something greater: some great and noble words to hold in my mind as I stepped across the threshold of the universe.

But what were they to be?

Religion had been done to death.

Perhaps I could conjure up some great insight into the peculiar electron bonding of diborane (B2H6), for instance, or the as yet unsolved atomic valences of Zeise’s salt.

Yes, that was it!

Paradise would welcome me. “Well done, de Luce,” the vast crystal angels would say, flickering with frozen fire as I set foot upon their doorstep.

I hugged myself, cuddling in my own warmth.

How comfortable death was when properly done.

“Miss Flavia,” Dogger said, breaking in upon my pleasant thoughts. He had stopped rowing the skiff for a few moments and was pointing.

I snapped out of my reverie in a split second. If it had been anyone but Dogger, I’d have taken my sweet time about it.

“That’s Volesthorpe over there,” he said, pointing. “St. Mildred’s is just to the left of the tallest elm.”

He knew I wouldn’t want to miss it: St.-­Mildred’s-­in-­the-­Marsh, where Canon Whitbread, the notorious “Poisoning Parson,” had just two years ago dispatched several of his female parishioners by lacing their Communion wine with cyanide.

It had been done for love, of course. Poison and Passion, I have discovered, are as closely connected as Laurel and Hardy.

“Looks a harmless enough place,” I said. “Like something from the pages of Picturesque England.”

“Yes,” Dogger said. “Such places often do. Horrific crimes can sometimes bleed a location of all feeling.”

He fell into silence as he gazed across the water and I knew he was thinking of the Japanese prisoner-­of-­war camp in which he and Father had been so badly abused.

As I have said, Father’s death, six months ago, was the reason we were now adrift on the river: my sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, and, of course, me, Flavia.

Undine, as originally planned, had already gone up to London with Aunt Felicity.

In the bow, her face damp with mosquito repellent, Feely lay languishing on a couple of striped pillows, staring down at her own reflection in the still water just ahead of our punt. She had not spoken since we set out this morning. The fingers of her right hand hammered out a tune on the gunwales—­one of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words: I recognized it by the rhythm—­but her face was a perfect blank.

On the raised wicker seat, Daffy sat hunched over a book—­Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy—­oblivious to the glorious English landscape sliding slowly by on either side.

Father’s sudden and unexpected death had knocked our family into a kind of coma, brought on, I believe, by the fact that we de Luces are constitutionally incapable of expressing our grief.

Only Dogger had broken down, howling like a dog in the night, then silent and impassive in the long and tortured days that followed.

It was pitiful.

The funeral had been a shambles. Denwyn Richardson, the vicar and one of Father’s oldest and dearest friends, had been seized at the outset by uncontrollable sobbing, unable to continue, and the service had to be halted until a stopgap clergyman could be found. In the end, poor old Canon Walpole was located in the next village, dragged from his sickbed, and rushed to St. Tancred’s, where he finished what his colleague had begun, barking from a rattling chest cold at the graveside like a hundred hounds.

It was a nightmare.

Bent on taking charge, Aunt Felicity had (as I have said) swooped down from London, the death of her only—­and younger—­brother having driven her into a frenzy, during which she treated us all like particularly dim-­witted galley slaves, slinging orders about like a grill cook:

“Straighten those magazines, Flavia. Put them in alphabetical and then in chronological order, right side up, in the cupboard. This is a drawing room, not a jackdaw’s nest. Ophelia, fetch a mop and pull down those spider’s webs. The place is like a tomb.”

Editorial Reviews

National Bestseller
A New York Times Bestseller
Shortlisted for the 2019 Bony Blithe Award

"This is another top-notch installment in a mystery series that manages to be both funny and creepy. More, please." —People

"Outstanding. . . . As usual, Bradley makes his improbable series conceit work and relieves the plot's inherent darkness with clever humor." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"There's only one Flavia. . . . Series fans will anticipate the details of this investigation, along with one last taste of Flavia's unorthodox family life." —Library Journal, starred review

"Fans of the precocious sleuth who share her unapologetically enthusiastic sense that 'an unexamined corpse was a tale untold' will rub their hands gleefully, confident that her resolution will unleash a dazzling barrage of innocent-seeming questions, recherché chemical and pharmacological tidbits, fibs and whoppers, and the most coyly bratty behavior outside the pages of Kay Thompson's chronicles of Eloise. . . . Bradley's unquenchable heroine brings 'the most complicated case I had ever come across' to a highly satisfying conclusion, with the promise of still brighter days ahead." —Kirkus Reviews
Praise for the Flavia de Luce series:
• "[Bradley] has created one of the most endearing protagonists the traditional mystery genre, typified by the works of Agatha Christie, has seen in a very long time. . . . Bradley secures his position as a confident, talented writer and storyteller." —The Globe and Mail
• "Flavia de Luce [is] perhaps contemporary crime fiction's most original character." —Maclean's
• "There is such a thing as willing suspension of disbelief brought on by sheer outlandish charm, and that's what [Alan] Bradley and some delicious writing have tapped." —London Free Press
• "Flavia de Luce [is] one of the most original and charming sleuths to appear in recent memory."Quill & Quire
• "Flavia, on the page, remains one of the most original and endearing characters around." —Calgary Herald
"Utterly beguiling." —People
• "Flavia walks right off the page and follows me through my day. I can hardly wait for the next book. Bravo." —Louise Penny, acclaimed author of Still Life

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