Showing results by author "Alan Bradley" in All Categories

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. 

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Amateur sleuth Flavia de Luce, along with her pestilent younger cousin, investigates the murder of a former public hangman and uncovers a secret that brings the greatest shock of her life. “I love the Flavia de Luce novels! Flavia is the best female detective I’ve...

It’s Christmastime, and the precocious Flavia de Luce—an eleven-year-old sleuth with a passion for chemistry and a penchant for crime-solving—is tucked away in her laboratory, whipping up a concoction to ensnare Saint Nick. But she is soon distracted when a film crew arrives at Buckshaw...

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.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 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...

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!

There's a new arrival at Buckshaw—Flavia de Luce's obnoxious cousin Undine. Flavia reluctantly takes on the mentorship of her fellow orphan, who in her best moments shows some potential for trespassing and trickery. When Major Greyleigh, a former hangman, is found dead from a breakfast of poisonous mushrooms, suspicion falls on the de Luce family's longtime cook, Mrs. Mullet. After all, didn't she pick the mushrooms and serve them to Greyleigh moments before his death? Flavia knows her beloved Mrs. Mullet is innocent. 

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.

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.

For very nearly eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, the discovery of a dead snipe on the doorstep of Buckshaw, the crumbling de Luce country seat, was a marvellous mystery - especially since this particular snipe had a rather rare stamp neatly impaled on its beak. Even more astonishing was the...

“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.

Carrie Jade is a chilling true-crime account of Samantha Cookes, a master manipulator who spent more than a decade reinventing herself across the UK and Ireland with an arsenal of false identities. From au pair and nanny to therapist, teacher, psychologist, even terminally ill author and...

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…

***SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING MOLLY BELLE WRIGHT, MARTIN FREEMAN, JONATHAN PRYCE, AND TOBY JONES*** A nun’s corpse leads intrepid amateur sleuth Flavia de Luce to uncover decades-old secrets in this final instalment of the much beloved, New York Times bestselling series. “I...

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!

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “The world’s greatest adolescent British chemist/busybody/sleuth” (The Seattle Times), Flavia de Luce, returns in a twisty mystery novel from award-winning author Alan Bradley. In the wake of an unthinkable family tragedy, twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce is...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER On a spring morning in 1951, eleven-year-old chemist and aspiring detective Flavia de Luce gathers with her family at the railway station, awaiting the return of her long-lost mother, Harriet. Yet upon the train’s arrival in the English village of Bishop’s Lacey...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Flavia de Luce—“part Harriet the Spy, part Violet Baudelaire from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” (The New York Times Book Review)—takes her remarkable sleuthing prowess to the unexpectedly unsavory world of Canadian boarding schools in...