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A Flavia de Luce Novel
by Alan Bradley
A finger in a wedding cake is only the beginning in this deliciously shocking mystery featuring Flavia de Luce, "the world's greatest adolescent British chemist/busybody/sleuth" (The Seattle Times).
Although it is autumn in the small English town of Bishop's Lacey, the chapel is decked with exotic flowers. Yes, Flavia de Luce's sister Ophelia is at last getting hitched, like a mule to a wagon. "A church is a wonderful place for a wedding," muses Flavia, "surrounded as it is by the legions of the dead, whose listening bones bear silent witness to every promise made at the altar." Flavia is not your normal twelve-year-old girl. An expert in the chemical nature of poisons, she has solved many mysteries, sharpening her considerable detection skills to the point where she had little choice but to turn professional. So Flavia and dependable Dogger, estate gardener and sounding board extraordinaire, set up shop at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, eager to serve - not so simple an endeavor with her odious little moon-faced cousin, Undine, constantly underfoot. But Flavia and Dogger persevere. Little does she know that their first case will be extremely close to home, beginning with an unwelcome discovery in Ophelia's wedding cake: a human finger.
"Starred Review. Bradley, who has few peers at combining fair-play clueing with humor and has fun mocking genre conventions, shows no sign of running out of ideas." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Despite the novel's patently improbable plot, Flavia's over-the-top use of alliteration ('ghastly goings-on at the graveside') and proudly precocious, sesquipedalian vocabulary ("I delight in deliquescence"), along with the thoroughly endearing cast of characters, make this series' tenth installment a laugh-out-loud winner." - Booklist
"Perhaps the most consistently hilarious adventure of the alarmingly precocious heroine, who's capable of confiding in her readers with a perfectly straight face: 'I don't know if you've ever dissected a rat, but to me, there was only one word for it: exhilarating.'" - Kirkus
This information about The Golden Tresses of the Dead was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Shirley Bradley
Alan Bradley is the New York Times bestselling author of many short stories, children's stories, newspaper columns, and the memoir The Shoebox Bible. His first Flavia de Luce novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, received the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award, the Dilys Winn Award, the Arthur Ellis Award, the Agatha Award, the Macavity Award, and the Barry Award, and was nominated for the Anthony Award. His other Flavia de Luce novels are The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, A Red Herring Without Mustard, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Speaking from Among the Bones, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, and Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd, as well as the ebook short story "The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse."
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