In a fading English mansion, a father, wracked by war and loss, is raising three daughters alone. But in the summer of 1950, a series of inexplicable events strikes Buckshaw, the family home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. A visitor comes in the middle of the night. Hours later, Flavia, the youngest de Luce daughter, finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him take his dying breath. For Flavia, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. ?I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn?t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.?

To Flavia, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, the case is the stuff of science: full of possibilities, contradictions and connections. Soon, her father is seized, accused of murder. And in a constable?s office, during a terrible thunderstorm, Colonel de Luce tells his daughter an astounding story?of a schoolboy friendship turned ugly, of a priceless postage stamp that vanished in a bizarre and brazen act of thievery, of a Latin teacher who flung himself to his death from the school?s rooftop thirty years before. Now, Flavia is armed with more than enough knowledge to tie two distant deaths together, to examine new suspects and begin a search that will lead her all the way to the King of England himself. Of this much the girl is sure: her father is innocent of murder?but protecting her and her sisters from something even worse?

An enthralling mystery, a piercing depiction of class and society, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a masterfully-told tale of deceptions?and a rich, literary delight.