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

by Alan Bradley

The very best people are like that. They don’t entangle you like flypaper.

“Life can kill you, but only if you let it.

“Love’s not some big river that flows on and on forever, and if you believe it is, you’re a bloody fool.

How I longed to tell her about Harriet—but somehow I could not. The grief in the room belonged to Porcelain, and I realized, almost at once, that it would be selfish to rob her of it in any way.

Johnson had declared portrait painting to be an improper employment for a woman. “Public practice of any art, and staring in men’s faces, is very indelicate in a female,” he had said.

It always surprises me after a family row to find that the world outdoors has remained the same. While the passions and feelings that accumulate like noxious gases inside a house seem to condense and cling to the walls and ceilings like old smoke, the out-of-doors is different. The landscape seems incapable of accumulating human radiation. Perhaps the wind blows anger away.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the nursery rhyme riddle is the most basic form of the detective story. It’s a mystery stripped of all but the essential facts.

There’s nothing as beautiful as the sound of a piano in the next room.

“We always want to love the recipients of our charity,” the doctor said, negotiating a sharp bend in the road with a surprising demonstration of steering skill, “but it is not necessary. Indeed, it is sometimes not possible.”

Generations of breeding and his natural gallantry had turned what might have been a sticky situation into a perfect triumph, and my bedroom, rather than the anticipated field of battle, had suddenly become a reception chamber.