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It's less than a week until Christmas and precocious 11-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce might be on one of her biggest cases: proving Father Christmas exists. Her older sisters, Feely and Daffy, have mocked her, telling her the gift-giver is "no more than a cruel hoax perpetuated by parents who wish to shower gifts upon their icky offspring without having to actually touch them." So Flavia, chemist extraordinaire, concocts a solution of birdlime, which she'll use to coat the chimney pot – should anyone try to shimmy down the chimney, he will get stuck. There's more going on at Buckshaw, the de Luce's crumbling ancestral home. In order to allay the taxmen and bill collectors, Flavia's father has rented out the mansion to a film crew during Christmastime. The beautiful but mercurial actress Phyllis Wyvern has arrived, as well as the dashing film star Desmond Duncan, and a host of other actors, a scowling director and a put-upon personal assistant. Even amid all the egos, the actors agree to a charity performance at Buckshaw, to benefit Vicar Denwyn Richardson's church, St. Tancred's. The Christmas Eve performance brings out half the town. By the end of the performance – scenes from Romeo and Juliet – actors and audience have become snowed in, and so Buckshaw has a whole houseful of suspects when the inevitable murder occurs. Not surprisingly, Flavia is the one to discover the body. If this reads like a classic country house mystery, it is, in part. Even the police inspector makes a reference to the murder being "rather like an Agatha Christie" (and the title of Bradley's book comes from the same poem, "The Lady of Shallot," as the title of Christie's "A Mirror Crack'd"). But where we deviate from Christie is in the whimsy of Flavia and her descriptions of life at Buckshaw. Christmas, after all, is always best seen through the eyes of a child. § Lourdes Venard is a newspaper editor in Long Island, N.Y.
Reviewed by Lourdes Venard, December 2011
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