The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

by Alan Bradley

‘Sirence!’ I would hiss, fixing them with an awful stare. ‘Ancestahs lequire sirence.’

Jesus Christ are you fucking kidding me with this

Honabuh ancestahs lequire comprete dahkness!’)

Fucking stop that

“This was ‘The Resurrection of Tchang Fu,’ and that was the way I planned to stage it for Parents’ Day.

I'm glad we had a long, pointless, racist tangent like this.

But soon the black warms to brown, the brown to red, the red to orange, the orange to bright carmine; on to indigo, and Venetian red—a

... Are you saying it turns from carmine to indigo to red?

when I happened to glance across and catch a glimpse of shocking red hair, hair that could belong to only one person.

Yes, the only redhead in the British isles

“A bankrupt?”

Is bankrupt a noun?

I knew that a substance tends to be dissolved by solvents that are chemically similar to it. There was no rational explanation for this; it was simply the way of Nature.

That...chemistry is the rational explanation. Because chemistry and polarity of molecules and different chemical bonds and what kind of genius best-who's-ever-lived chemist are you?

“Missing in Action?” Why wasn’t Father’s photo hanging there? I wondered. Father was generally as absent as these young men whose bones were somewhere in France.

Oh fuck off you entitled little twit

Using my thumbs and forefingers as a dual pair of pincers, I yanked down on the braces with all the strength I could muster, and with a satisfying “click” the things popped out of my mouth

JESUS. I don't know if 50's braces were different but based on my own experience that would be a) VERY DIFFICULT and b) hurt like holy hell

Detective Sergeant Graves,

Who?

until she finished it, we were likely to be lashed daily at breakfast with obscure phrases in a style of prose as stiff and inflexible as a parlor poker.

Because your own prose is so fluid and natural

These two so absorbed in book and looking-glass

It seems weird to be shaming a character for reading too much...in a book...with such a pretentious narrator who references books constantly...

Only one thing more (well, two things, actually; three at most) were needed to wrap this whole thing up like a box of birthday sweets

...we're at 66%. So... You're either wrong or that one little thing is going to take fucking forever

“Symbolic, sir. Ophelia is the innocent victim of a murderous family whose members are all totally self-absorbed. At least that’s what I think.”

That's not symbolic, that's literally what she is.

Today, though, I’d had too much on my mind to bother, so when I had bicycled no more than a mile from Rook’s End, I threw myself down on the grassy bank and stared up into the summer sky.

Didn't she already figure out the murder? Wasn't it one piece of evidence away from the denouement?

staring up at the blue vault of Heaven as earnestly as those old pillar-squatting fakirs in India used to stare directly into the sun before we civilized them,

Can we not with all the casual racism?

He was predeceased by his parents, Marius and Dorothea Twining, of Winchester, Hants. He is survived by a niece, Matilda Mountjoy, of Bishop’s Lacey.

So... What about his sister?

Haviland de Luce,

I thought his name was Lawrence

Frank Pemberton was Bob Stanley and Bob Stanley was “The Third Man,” so to speak. It was he who had murdered Horace Bonepenny in the cucumber patch at Buckshaw. I’d be willing to stake my life on it.

*gasp* What a twist that definitely wasn't obvious half a book ago. Also, again, I thought she said she'd already figured everything out.

Could Pemberton—or Bob Stanley, as I now knew him to be—have come across the book, or the phrase, in England?

The phrase "becoming fast friends" is not some weird regional thing that had to come from this one book and nowhere else.

I gave a delicious shiver at the thought of the yeasty remains that lay beneath my feet.

... Yeasty?

It was like something right out of an Agatha Christie. Someone—perhaps even Miss Christie

Yeah why *isn't* little miss detective a huge Christie fan?

At bottom, it was the sour reek of soil that has lain for many years directly beneath a human dwelling: a bitter scent of things best not thought about. Superimposed upon that background was the sweet odor of old motor oil, the sharp undulating tang of ancient petrol, carbon monoxide, tire rubber, and perhaps a faint whiff of ozone from long-burnt-out spark plugs.

Man she has an amazing sense of smell with a head cold

the only way out was up. If

Why can't she go back up the stairs?

I’d forgotten about the stairs at the end of the pit! I

HOW?! YOU JUST CAME DOWN THEM

I woke up.

Look, making up dreams is hard. It's hard to capture the jumpy, nonsensical feeling of them. You...super failed.

Think, for instance, of revenge.

How about escape? Might be more useful. Unless you plan to be a vengeful ghost

Something like the murder weapon? Had he returned to Buckshaw to retrieve it?

You realize you never actually got round to addressing that, right? Like, technically we still don't know how he was killed, even though supposedly you've solved everything 20% ago.

The unmistakable fumes of the carbon tetrachloride would have been quickly transmitted to his mouth and nasal cavities as I had detected.

I don't care enough to look up all the pharmacokinetic properties of this chemical but this seems unlikely...

Nobody loved me, and that was a fact.

Well you're a horrible little shit, so

splenius capitus

Three seconds of searching tells me it's spelled capitis

The carbon tet evaporates in no time, with hardly a trace. The

I caved and a cursory search of the toxicology of carbon tetrachloride didn't net me anything about injection as a route of exposure, even deliberately looking for it, so...I'm not willing to do any more work on that front and this could all be totally sound, I'm just saying I'm skeptical about this.

Pemberton knelt down and loosened the buckle of his belt. As the leather dropped from my ankles I gathered my strength and kicked him in the teeth.

Good thing he's an idiot and you're apparently an amazing athlete who can kick a grown man hard enough to send him sprawling, even after being bound for who knows how long

Directly above my head, trembling like a living thing, was the undercarriage of Harriet’s Rolls-Royce.

You know, I would've been annoyed if she'd managed to luck her way to freedom, but having a deus ex machina instead isn't better

“The effects of carbon tetrachloride are intensified by alcohol,”

Maybe via ingestion or inhalation since it's very hepatotoxic but I feel like if it's so deadly injected into the brain alcohol probably wasn't as much of an issue. Again, can't be bothered to look up details of the toxicology to find out the exact interaction, so I could be wrong.

I also suspected that Bonepenny’s plugged nasal passages might well have preserved the injected carbon tetrachloride, which is insoluble in water—or in snot, for that matter—which would also have helped inhibit the intake of outside air.

I mean the blood brain barrier is a thing and so is partitioning and if it killed him so quickly I don't know how much there would be systemically and even if there is if it's not soluble it's probably not present because that's kind of how partitioning works and just... Look, I have a lot of questions and I so can't be bothered to dig into the literature to find the answers but it's bothering me

“Still easily detectable,” I said. “Child’s play. Of course I used p-Aminodimethylaniline. That’s rather a new test, but an elegant one. It

I almost want to look these methods up but I'm so close to being done and I don't care enough.

Would Dogger have done it out of loyalty—or during one of his peculiar turns?

We've established this like six times, wrap it the fuck up

Why confuse the Inspector with unnecessary details?

Why annoy the reader with them

“A P?” I asked, surprised. “What does P stand for?”

Precocious, pretentious prat?

my violet eyes, my pale complexion:

Oh fuck off with this Mary Sue bullshit

And it was signed simply “George.”

Well that was a totally necessary footnote.