A Red Herring Without Mustard (Flavia de Luce #3)

by Alan Bradley

I’d learned quite early in life that the mind loves nothing better than to spook itself with outlandish stories, as if the various coils of the brain were no more than a troop of roly-poly Girl Guides huddled over a campfire in the darkness of the skull.

Red blood cells, I remembered from my chemical experiments, were really not much more than a happy soup of water, sodium, potassium, chloride, and phosphorus. Mix them together in the proper proportions, though, and they formed a viscous liquid jelly: a jelly with mystic capabilities, one that could contain in its scarlet complexities not just nobility but also treachery.

“May the Lord bless me and keep me and make His face to shine upon me; may He fill me with great grace and lightning-quick thinking.”

Whenever I’m with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.