Staff Pick – As Chimney Sweepers Come To Dust by Alan Bradley

  She is 12 years old, a chemist in training who loves her poisons, the youngest of three sisters, and an aspiring detective.  She only aspires to being a detective because of her habit of stumbling across dead bodies.  She grew up in  Buckshaw her family’s estate in the beautiful English countryside near the village of Bishop’s Lacey.   Very recently, however, Flavia has been unceremoniously bundled up by her father and aunt and banished to Canada to attend Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, a private finishing school in Toronto.  There she will complete her education at the same school her late mother Harriet attended.  At the end of the 6^th book in the Flavia de Luce mysteryseries I feared she might be sent off to the hinterlands of the British Empire (in this case Canada) never to be heard from again.   But she is back!