I Am Half-sick of Shadows by Alan Bradley
Once again the precocious eleven-year-old detective Flavia de Luce is up to her eyeballs in mystery. This time the setting is a snowy Christmas at Buckshaw, her family’s majestic but decrepit estate. A wing of the mansion has been booked for a film crew and the entire village couldn’t be more star-struck: Phyllis Wyvern, the biggest movie star in the world, has landed in their midst.
Flavia, who’s been busy applying her deductive skills to ferret out the truth about Father Christmas, becomes involved in arranging accommodations for the film crew. When Flavia was a baby her mother died in a mountaineering accident and since then her father has withdrawn from mundane household responsibilities. Her self-absorbed teenaged sisters are predicably inept in Flavia’s opinion, so she takes charge with the aid of Dogger, the dotty family retainer and Mrs. Mullet, the incompetent cook. Each of the delightfully eccentric characters is well drawn and portrayed from a comedic perspective. Flavia herself is an interesting mix of naivety and cunning, hence her determination to set a trap for Father Christmas by coating the chimney pot with a concoction of birdlime.
Before filming is scheduled to begin, the local vicar takes the opportunity to request a fundraising performance by the movie’s starring actress and her leading man. The love scene from Romeo and Juliet is performed in the front hall of the de Luce home but there are glitches which cause Flavia to suspect something is seriously amiss. The evening ends with a horrendous blizzard requiring the entire audience to be billeted overnight. Phone lines are down and the roads are impassable. The scene has been set for a murder and of course, it is Flavia who first discovers the victim and finds the clues that the police overlook.
With an entire mansion of suspects, the police are busy chasing red herrings while Flavia uses her intimate knowledge of Buckshaw in order to conduct her own parallel investigation. Ultimately, it will be her extensive knowledge of chemistry that will be needed to apprehend the murderer even as her life is put at risk. The murder will be solved…but the question of Father Christmas? Flavia may find that mystery a bit harder to decipher.
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows. By Alan Bradley. Doubleday Canada, 271 pages, $29.95.