Flavia\u2019s never been more alone. Her beloved father, Col. Haviland de Luce, has died, leaving her an orphan; her sister Ophelia is off on the grand tour with her bridegroom; and her sister Daffy (Daphne to the uninitiated) is bound for Oxford. Flavia would be entirely on her own if it weren\u2019t for her father\u2019s war comrade Arthur W. Dogger, now a gardener who\u2019s accepted 11-year-old Flavia as a full partner in his detective agency; her orphaned cousin, Undine; and Margaret Mullet, the cook at Buckshaw, the de Luce home in Bishop\u2019s Lacey. And Flavia may be about to lose this last companion, because when her neighbor, retired civil servant Maj. Tommy Greyleigh, suddenly dies, Insp. Hewitt thinks that Mrs. Mullet fed him a dish of poisonous mushrooms. Since Flavia knows more about poisons than anyone else alive in 1952, she eagerly jumps to the defense of Mrs. Mullet, who\u2019s questioned and released. But that\u2019s not enough for Flavia, who\u2019s become convinced that Maj. Greyleigh was assassinated on the orders of Asterion, a shadowy figure in that equally shadowy intelligence force, the Nide, where Flavia\u2019s father and her aunt Felicity once reportedly worked. No one remotely associated with the Nide, or with the nearby American service base at Leathcote, will utter a word about the dread Asterion, so it\u2019s up to Flavia to smash every taboo in her quest for truth, justice, and diversion.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Flavia\u2019s never been more alone. Her beloved father, Col. Haviland de Luce, has died, leaving her an orphan; her sister Ophelia is off on the grand tour with her bridegroom; and her sister Daffy (Daphne to the uninitiated) is bound for Oxford. Flavia would be entirely on her own if it weren\u2019t for her father\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}