AHMM, November 2009 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dell Magazines

Department: BOOKED & PRINTED by Robert C. Hahn

Too often when children appear in adult mysteries, they are either briefly sketched or drawn as unlikely paragons of good or embodiments of evil. This month we look at a few authors who manage to capture the real fears and struggles of kids and teens as they find themselves caught up in crime.

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Alan Bradley's delightful debut, the sweetness at the bottom of the pie(Delacorte, $23), introduces an unforgettable eleven-year-old heroine named Flavia de Luce who combines the courage, curiosity, and deductive abilities of the best adult detectives with the mischievousness and wonder appropriate to her age.

Flavia and her two older sisters, Ophelia, seventeen, and Daphne, thirteen, live with their father, Colonel de Luce in Buckshaw, an odd, old Georgian pile with Victorian wings. It is 1950 and the family lives with a cook, Mrs. Mullet, and the Colonel's factotum, Arthur Dogger (the children's mother died when Flavia was only one year old). The Colonel's all-consuming interest is philately, leaving the girls to fly in their own orbits: Ophelia with her music, Daphne with her books, and Flavia with her chemistry.

The precocious Flavia possesses a first-rate chemistry laboratory, once the province of Uncle Tarquin de Luce, “replete with German glassware, German microscopes, a German spectroscope, brass chemical balances from Lucerne, and a complexly shaped mouth-blown German Geisler tube.” The lab, sealed since Tarquin's death in 1928, becomes Flavia's “sanctum sanctorum,” where the youngster evinces both fascination with and talent for using the equipment as her knowledge “of what could be extracted so easily from nature” increases.

One morning the de Luces find a dead jack snipe on their doorstep with a rare stamp pierced by its bill. Shortly thereafter, Flavia discovers a dying man in their cucumber patch who manages only to whisper “vale” before expiring.

Bradley spins a clever web that reaches far into Colonel de Luce's past, the vagaries of stamp collecting, and old-school traditions. It is up to Flavia to sort out the connections that bind her father and the dead man, and the circumstances that lead the police to consider her father the prime suspect.

The sibling rivalry between Flavia and her sisters brings plenty of smiles, and Flavia's ability to maneuver in a world run by adults, using a brilliant array of tactics, is captivating. Her chemistry skills repeatedly prove invaluable, but ultimately it is her courage and heart that will win readers completely and leave them eagerly awaiting an encore performance.

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THE ODDS (Minotaur, $24.95) is Kathleen George's fourth mystery to feature Richard Christie and his Pittsburgh Police Department colleagues. The children here—Meg, Laurie, Susannah, and Joel—are scene-stealers who take over the book and capture readers’ hearts.

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