Showing results by author "Alan Bradley" in All Categories

It is June 1950 and a sleepy English village is about to be awakened by the discovery of a dead body in Colonel de Luce's cucumber patch. The police are baffled, and when a dead snipe is deposited on the Colonel's doorstep with a rare stamp impaled on its beak, they are baffled even more. Only the Colonel's daughter, the precocious Flavia, has the ingenuity to follow the clues that reveal the victim's identity.

Flavia de Luce, the 12-year-old chemist and amateur detective, is eager to turn professional. She and her father's valet, Dogger, have founded a detective agency, Arthur Dogger & Associates, and unexpectedly cut into their first case during the revelry at her sister's wedding reception. After an eventful ceremony with a missing best man and spontaneous ventriloquist act, spirits are high as Feely and her new husband head for the towering and beautifully iced wedding cake. But as Feely slices into the first piece, a scream rings out - the bridal cake contains a severed human finger.

When Flavia de Luce is banished to Miss Bodycote's Female Academy in Canada, she’s soon on familiar ground when, on her first night, a mummified body is dislodged from a chimney, and she is presented with a gruesome puzzle to solve. Girls have been disappearing with alarming regularity, leading Flavia to wonder not only how and why but what exactly is the academy's true purpose? Flavia must enter a shadowy world where truth and lies seem interchangeable and no one can be trusted.

“You frighten me,” the Gypsy said. “Never have I seen my crystal ball so filled with darkness.” For Flavia de Luce, the old gypsy's words open up old wounds and new possibilities. Is she a faker, or is there some truth to her powers? And when the village is rocked by another ghastly murder, how will a growing fascination with gypsy lore help Flavia to solve it?

Twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce is back at Buckshaw at last, but her homecoming is overshadowed by news of her father's illness. Forbidden from visiting him in hospital, Flavia busies herself in the village, but she soon makes a macabre discovery: the corpse of a reclusive woodcarver in an empty house, except for a curiously uncurious cat. Curiosity may not kill this cat, but Flavia is energized at the prospect of a new investigation. However, what awaits Flavia will shake her to the core.

Flavia is enjoying the summer, spending her days punting along the river with her reluctant family. Languishing in boredom, she drags a slack hand in the water - and catches her fingers in the open mouth of a drowned corpse. Flavia needs to put her super-sleuthing skills to the test to investigate the murder of three gossips in the local church and to keep her sisters out of danger.

With the family finances in a parlous state, Flavia's father has rented Buckshaw to a film company for a location shooting. When a heavy snowfall cuts the village off, the actors are talked into staging a benefit performance in the parish hall. But old jealousies surface, and the leading lady is murdered. Flavia, who has been enlisted to help out behind the scenes, finds herself up to her knees in snow - and murder!

The absence of Flavia DeLuce’s mother, Harriet, has always cast a shadow, since her presumed death in a mountaineering accident in Tibet. Now, astonishingly, a specially commissioned train is bringing Harriet back to Buckshaw. But rather than putting the past finally to rest, Harriet's return is set to trigger a further series of bizarre and deadly events, as a most curious group of individuals converge on Buckshaw to pay their respects…

The villagers of Bishop’s Lacey are holding their collective breath as St Tancred’s tomb in the local church is about to be opened after five hundred years. Inveterate eleven-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce is first at the scene, but the body she finds lying there is not that of a desiccated saint; it is Mr Collicutt, St Tancred's celebrated organist.

When a mysterious puppet show arrives in Bishop's Lacey, death is not far behind... a grisly murder during a performance of Jack and the Beanstalk in the village hall reaches back to an earlier crime that has cast a shadow over the village for years. Flavia's investigations test her powers of deduction to the limit - and provide a shocking insight into the darker corners of the adult world.

If you enjoy your horror dipped in buckets of blood and sprinkled with generous amounts of blasphemy, then you've come to the right place!

Flavia de Luce und ihre Familie stehen kurz vor dem finanziellen Ruin. Da tut sich plötzlich eine unverhoffte Geldquelle auf...

Nie zuvor hat die junge Flavia de Luce einen so aufregenden Theaterabend erlebt...

Flavia ist zwar erst elf, hat es aber faustdick hinter den Ohren bzw. in ihrem Labor. Die Leidenschaft der klugen Kleinen gilt nämlich der Chemie...