by Alan Bradley
read by Jayne Entwistle
ages: adult
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Flavia DeLuce is an 11-year-old aspiring chemist in 1950s England. Often at odds with her two older sisters, she mostly tries to stay out of the way. That is, when she’s not researching poisons.

Then one fateful night, her father has an argument with a stranger, who turns up dead in the cucumber patch, uttering one word: “Vale”. Flavia (of course) was there to hear it, and it sets her on a path to figure out who the murderer really is, and free her father.

On the one hand, I was thoroughly entertained by Entwistle’s reading of this book. Her voices were terrific, and she managed to keep my attention, even though I had problems with the book itself. The first one being the number of similes. Oh. My. Heavens. If I drank, I’d make a drinking game of them. And I’d be plastered by the end of chapter 2. I tried counting them, but I lost count after a dozen (within 10 minutes or so). I was complaining about them to Hubby, and he did point out that Flavia — who is a precocious child (I don’t like precocious children in adult fiction; it grates) — is the narrator, which may have something to do with the inordinate number of similes. Even so, I resigned myself to them, rolling my eyes whenever I heard one.

My other problem was that I called the murderer too early. Bradley introduced a random character about halfway through, and even though I didn’t know how or why, I knew he had to be the murderer. Why else introduce a random character. And, in many ways, I find that bad form.

But, it wasn’t a terrible waste of time — I did finish it after all. Even if it wasn’t perfect.