Alan Bradley It is June 1950 and a sleepy English village is about to be awakened by the discovery of a dead body in Colonel de Luces cucumber patch. The police are baffled, and when a dead snipe is deposited on the Colonels doorstep with a rare stamp impaled on its beak, they are baffled even more. Only the Colonels daughter, the precocious Flavia -when shes not plotting elaborate revenges against her nasty older sisters in her basement chemical laboratory, that is - has the ingenuity to follow the clues that reveal the victims identity, and a conspiracy that reached back into the de Luce familys murky past. Flavia and her family are brilliant creations, a darkly playful and wonderfully atmospheric flavour to a plot of delightful ingenuity.