What Time the Sexton's Spade Doth Rust (Flavia de Luce, #11)

by Alan Bradley

In my experience, nothing is more deeply refreshing than to huddle under a bumbershoot in the rain and the raw fog of a country graveyard.

These days, my only friends are fungi.

“Death of a minor civil servant. Sounds like a Ngaio Marsh novel, doesn’t it? Or an Agatha Christie. Something green and slim from Smith’s to read on the train.”

It’s strange, isn’t it, how sadness is first detected by the nose? One would expect the eyes to lead the way, but it’s invariably the nose that triggers the earliest alarm. Sadness is much like smoke, I’ve decided: an odor raised at the very doorstep of the brain.

Why, I wondered, do people always drag out the oldest clichés first?

“One hundred and seventy degrees,” I said. I didn’t just pick this number out of thin air: It was the melting point of cyanide, one of my greatest enthusiasms.