Tag Archives: canadian book

Alan Bradley wove another enjoyable and intriguing tale starring Flavia de Luce, the darker, British version of Harriet the Spy. I had already fallen hard for Flavia when reading The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag — books one and two in the Buckshaw Chronicles. In the third installment of this bestselling, award-winning, sister-poisoning, bicycle-riding, murder-investigating, and utterly captivating series, Flavia de Luce must draw upon Gypsy lore and her encyclopaedic knowledge of poisons to prevent a grave miscarriage of justice. “You frighten me,” the old Gypsy woman says. “Never have I seen my crystal ball so filled with darkness.” So begins eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce’s third adventure through the charming but deceptively dark byways of the village of Bishop’s Lacey. The Gypsy’s vision opens up old wounds for our precocious yet haunted heroine, and sets her mind racing in search of what it could mean. When Flavia later goes to visit the Gypsy at her encampment, she certainly doesn’t expect to find the poor old woman lying near death in her caravan, bludgeoned in the wee hours. Was it an act of retribution by those who thought that the woman had abducted a local child years before? But how can she prove this crime is connected to the missing baby? Did it have something to do with the weird sect who met at the river to practice their secret rites? While still pondering the possibilities, Flavia stumbles upon a corpse—that [...]