The Grave's a Fine and Private Place Read online

  Reviewers love Alan Bradley’s New York Times bestselling

  Flavia de Luce series!

  THRICE the BRINDED CAT HATH MEW’D

  New York Times bestseller

  USA Today bestseller

  LibraryReads pick

  “Bradley’s heroine is one of the most delightful, and one of the sharpest, sleuths to come along in a long, long time.”

  —Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

  “The preteen version of Miss Marple…In addition to the meticulous investigations, what makes these novels, including this eighth in the series, so enjoyable is the personality of the primary character who, while being a murder investigator savant, is also an emotionally vulnerable little girl. It is a very unusual combination…and it works.”

  —Mystery Scene

  “Mystery fans seeking novels of wit, an immersive English countryside setting, and rich characterizations will be rewarded with this newest entry in the award-winning series.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “A Flavia de Luce mystery is a bitter, dark, and thoroughly scrumptious treat….Highly recommended; don’t miss this!”

  —Historical Novel Society

  “Bradley’s preteen heroine comes through in the end with a series of deductions so clever she wants to hug herself. So will you.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  As CHIMNEY SWEEPERS COME to DUST

  #1 Pick for LibraryReads

  #1 Maclean’s bestseller

  #3 New York Times bestseller

  #6 Indie bestseller

  #7 Publishers Weekly bestseller

  “Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, perhaps contemporary crime fiction’s most original character—to say she is Pippi Longstocking with a Ph.D. in chemistry (speciality: poisons) barely begins to describe her—is finally coming home.”

  —Maclean’s

  “Plot twists come faster than Canadian snowfall….Bradley’s sense of observation is as keen as gung-ho scientist Flavia’s….The results so far are seven sparkling Flavia de Luce mysteries.”

  —LibraryReads

  “Even after all these years, Flavia de Luce is still the world’s greatest adolescent British chemist/busybody/sleuth.”

  —The Seattle Times

  The DEAD in THEIR VAULTED ARCHES

  #1 Library Journal pick

  #6 New York Times bestseller

  #3 Indie bestseller

  #3 NPR bestseller

  #10 Publishers Weekly bestseller

  “Bradley’s latest Flavia de Luce novel reaches a new level of perfection….These are astounding, magical books not to be missed.”

  —RT Book Reviews (Top Pick)

  “It’s hard to resist either the genre’s pre-eminent preteen sleuth or the hushed revelations about her family.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Excellent…Flavia retains her droll wit….The solution to the murder is typically neat, and the conclusion sets up future books nicely.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Young chemist and aspiring detective Flavia de Luce [uses] her knowledge of poisons, and her indefatigable spirit, to solve a dastardly crime in the English countryside while learning new clues about her mother’s disappearance.”

  —National Public Radio

  SPEAKING FROM AMONG the BONES

  “The precocious and irrepressible Flavia continues to delight. Portraying an eleven-year-old as a plausible sleuth and expert in poisons is no mean feat, but Bradley makes it look easy.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Bradley’s Flavia cozies, set in the English countryside, have been a hit from the start, and this fifth in the series continues to charm and entertain.”

  —Booklist

  “An excellent reminder that crime fiction can sparkle with wit, crackle with spirit and verge on the surreal…Flavia, once more, entertains and delights as she exposes the inner workings of her investigative mind to the reader.”

  —National Post (Canada)

  I AM HALF-SICK of SHADOWS

  “Every Flavia de Luce novel is a reason to celebrate, but Christmas with Flavia is a holiday wish come true for her fans.”

  —USA Today (four stars)

  “This is a classic country house mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie, and Poirot himself would approve of Flavia’s skills in snooping and deduction. Flavia is everything a reader wants in a detective—she’s smart, logical, intrepid and curious….This is a refreshingly engaging read.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “This is a delightful read through and through. We find in Flavia an incorrigible and wholly lovable detective; from her chemical experiments in her sanctum sanctorum to her outrage at the idiocy of the adult world, she is unequaled. Charming as a stand-alone novel and a guaranteed smash with series followers.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  A RED HERRING Without MUSTARD

  “Bradley’s third book about tween sleuth Flavia de Luce will make readers forget Nancy Drew.”

  —People

  “Think preteen Nancy Drew, only savvier and a lot richer, and you have Flavia de Luce….Don’t be fooled by Flavia’s age or the 1950s setting: A Red Herring isn’t a dainty tea-and-crumpets sort of mystery. It’s shot through with real grit.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Delightful…The book’s forthright and eerily mature narrator is a treasure.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Bradley’s characters, wonderful dialogue and plot twists are a most winning combination.”

  —USA Today

  The WEED That STRINGS the HANGMAN’S BAG

  “Flavia is incisive, cutting and hilarious…one of the most remarkable creations in recent literature.”

  —USA Today

  “Bradley takes everything you expect and subverts it, delivering a smart, irreverent, unsappy mystery.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “The real delight here is her droll voice and the eccentric cast….Utterly beguiling.”

  —People (four stars)

  “Endlessly entertaining…The author deftly evokes the period, but Flavia’s sparkling narration is the mystery’s chief delight. Comic and irreverent, this entry is sure to build further momentum for the series.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  The SWEETNESS at the BOTTOM of the PIE

  THE MOST AWARD-WINNING BOOK OF ANY YEAR!

  WINNER:

  Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel

  Barry Award for Best First Novel

  Agatha Award for Best First Novel

  Dilys Award

  Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel

  Spotted Owl Award for Best Novel

  CWA Debut Dagger Award

  “Impressive as a sleuth and enchanting as a mad scientist…Flavia is most endearing as a little girl who has learned how to amuse herself in a big lonely house.”

  —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

  “Sophisticated, series-launching…It’s a rare pleasure to follow Flavia as she investigates her limited but boundless-feeling world.”

  —Entertainment Weekly (A–)

  “A delightful new sleuth. A combination of Eloise and Sherlock Holmes…fearless, cheeky, wildly precocious.”

  —The Boston Globe

  DELACORTE PRESS

  NEW YORK

  The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coinc
idental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Alan Bradley

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DELACORTE PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Bradley, C. Alan, author.

  Title: The grave’s a fine and private place : a Flavia de Luce novel / Alan Bradley.

  Other titles: Flavia de Luce novel

  Description: New York : Delacorte Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017031500 | ISBN 9780345539991 (hardback) | ISBN 9780345540010 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: De Luce, Flavia (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | Child detectives—England—Fiction. | Serial murder Investigation—Fiction. | False testimony—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Historical. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9199.4.B7324 G73 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017031500

  Ebook ISBN 9780345540010

  randomhousebooks.com

  Text design by Diane Hobbing, adapted for ebook

  Cover design and artwork: Joe Montgomery

  Cover images: © Rivka Wilkins (parasol); © 123rf (skeleton/branches)

  v5.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Alan Bradley

  About the Author

  The grave’s a fine and private place,

  But none, I think, do there embrace.

  —Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress (1681)

  ·ONE·

  I AM ON MY deathbed.

  Again.

  Although I have done everything in my power to survive, it has not been enough. A human being can only bear so much.

  I turn my face to the wall in bitter remembrance.

  Father had died suddenly at Christmas, leaving a colossal vacuum which we quickly realized would never—could never—be filled. In some strange way, he had been the secret glue which held us all together, and with his passing my sisters and I, never friends at the best of times, had now—and quite inexplicably—become the most deadly of mortal enemies. Each of us, wanting desperately to be in charge—to gain some control over her shattered life—found herself at odds with the others at every turn. Words and crockery were thrown with equal carelessness. It didn’t seem to matter much who was hit.

  With our family on the verge of breaking up, Aunt Felicity had come down from London to sort us out.

  Or so she claimed.

  In case we had forgotten it, we were quickly reminded of the fact that our dear auntie was—as The Book of Common Prayer so charitably puts it—a woman who followed the devices and desires of her own heart.

  In short, she was at best a stubborn old woman and at worst a bully and a tyrant.

  Buckshaw was to be sold at once, Aunt Felicity insisted, even though in law it was mine to do with as I pleased. Feely was to be married off to her fiancé, Dieter Schrantz, with all haste—or at least as quickly as possible—as soon as a respectable period of mourning had been observed.

  Daffy would be sent up to Oxford to read English.

  “Who knows but that, given time, you might even become a gifted teacher,” Aunt Felicity had said, upon which Daffy had thrown her teacup and saucer into the fireplace and stormed out of the room.

  Tantrums were useless, Aunt Felicity had told us icily. Tantrums solve no problems, but only create new ones.

  As for me, I was to be taken up to London, along with my cousin Undine, to live with Aunt Felicity until she could decide what to do with us. In my case, I knew that meant sending me somewhere to continue those studies which had been interrupted when I was chucked out of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, in Canada.

  But what of Dogger and Mrs. Mullet? What would become of them?

  “They shall be paid off and each given a small pension in proportion to their years of service,” Aunt Felicity had decreed. “And I’m sure they will both be very grateful.”

  Dogger fobbed off with a pension? It was unthinkable. Dogger had given us almost his entire life: first to my father, then to my mother, and later to my sisters and myself.

  I pictured him sitting on a quaint wooden bench by a river somewhere, dressed in a rough-spun pensioner’s jacket, forced to beg bread from the passing tourists, who took occasional snapshots of him to send home to their cretinous relatives.

  Dogger deserved better than that.

  And Mrs. Mullet?

  Left to cook for total strangers, she would languish and die, and we would be responsible.

  Our lives were looking exceedingly grim.

  Then, at the beginning of February, to make matters worse, King George had died: King George VI, that lovely man who once sat and chatted so happily with me in our drawing room as if I were his own daughter; and with his passing, the entire nation—indeed all of the Commonwealth countries, perhaps even the whole world—joined in the shock and sadness of our own recent bereavement.

  And what of me? What of Flavia de Luce?

  I would perish, I decided.

  Rather than submit to a lifetime locked in some dismal pigeon-infested London square with an aunt who valued the Union Jack more than her own blood, I would simply do away with myself.

  And as an authority on poisons, I knew precisely how to accomplish it.

  No cyanide for me, thank you!

  I knew the symptoms all too well: the vertigo, the dizziness, the burning in the throat and stomach and, as the vagus nerve becomes paralyzed, the difficulty in breathing, the cold sweat, the feeble pulse, the muscular paralysis, the crushing heaviness of the heart, the slobbering…

  I think it was the slobbering, more than anything, that put me off the cyanide. What self-respecting young woman would want to be found dead in her bedroom drowned in her own drool?

  There were easier ways of joining the Heavenly Choir.

  And so, here I am on my deathbed, all warm and cozy, my half-closed eyes moving slowly for the last time across that ghastly red-clotted mustard-yellow wallpaper.

  I shall simply fall asleep and they will never find so much as a trace of what it was that did me in. How clever of me to have hit upon it!

  They’ll be sorry, I thought. They’ll all be sorry.

  But no! I mustn’t let it end like that. Mustn’t let it end with such a commonplace expression. That was the kind of platitude milkmaids died with—or match girls.

  The death of Flavia de Luce demanded something greater: some great and noble words to hold in my mind as I stepped across the threshold of the universe.

  But what were they to be?

  Religion had been done to death.

  Perhaps I could conjure up some great insight into the peculiar electron bonding of diborane (B2H6), for instance, or the as yet unsolved atomic valences of Zeise’s salt.

  Yes, that was it!

  Paradise would welcome me. “Well done, de Luce,” the vast crystal angels would say, flickering with frozen fire as I set foot upon their doorstep.

  I hugged myself, cuddling in my own warmth.

  How comfortable death was when properl
y done.

  “Miss Flavia,” Dogger said, breaking in upon my pleasant thoughts. He had stopped rowing the skiff for a few moments and was pointing.

  I snapped out of my reverie in a split second. If it had been anyone but Dogger, I’d have taken my sweet time about it.

  “That’s Volesthorpe over there,” he said, pointing. “St. Mildred’s is just to the left of the tallest elm.”

  He knew I wouldn’t want to miss it: St.-Mildred’s-in-the-Marsh, where Canon Whitbread, the notorious “Poisoning Parson,” had just two years ago dispatched several of his female parishioners by lacing their Communion wine with cyanide.

  It had been done for love, of course. Poison and Passion, I have discovered, are as closely connected as Laurel and Hardy.

  “Looks a harmless enough place,” I said. “Like something from the pages of Picturesque England.”

  “Yes,” Dogger said. “Such places often do. Horrific crimes can sometimes bleed a location of all feeling.”

  He fell into silence as he gazed across the water and I knew he was thinking of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in which he and Father had been so badly abused.

  As I have said, Father’s death, six months ago, was the reason we were now adrift on the river: my sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, and, of course, me, Flavia.

  Undine, as originally planned, had already gone up to London with Aunt Felicity.

  In the bow, her face damp with mosquito repellent, Feely lay languishing on a couple of striped pillows, staring down at her own reflection in the still water just ahead of our punt. She had not spoken since we set out this morning. The fingers of her right hand hammered out a tune on the gunwales—one of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words: I recognized it by the rhythm—but her face was a perfect blank.