Alan Bradley - A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel

Sophisticated, series-launching Its a rare pleasure to follow Flavia as she investigates her limited but boundless-feeling world.
Entertainment Weekly (A-)

THE MOST AWARD-WINNING BOOK
OF ANY YEAR!

TheSWEETNESSat the
BOTTOMof thePIE

THE FIRST NOVEL IN THE FLAVIA DE LUCE SERIES
BY ALAN BRADLEY

WINNER:

Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel
Barry Award for Best First Novel
Agatha Award for Best First Novel
Dilys Winn Award
Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel
Spotted Owl Award for Best Novel
CWA Debut Dagger Award

If ever there was a sleuth whos bold, brilliant, and, yes, adorable, its Flavia de Luce.
USA Today

Acclaim for Alan Bradley and the Flavia de Luce novels
The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag

Endlessly entertaining The author deftly evokes the period, but Flavias sparkling narration is the mysterys chief delight.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Brisk, funny and irrepressible, Flavia is distinctly uncute, and the cozy village setting has enough edges to keep suspicions sharp.

Houston Chronicle

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

Entertainment Weekly

Like its heroine, the novel is spiky, surprising fun.

Parade

Bradley has once again created an engaging, whimsical, twisting tale that rewards readers as much with its style and background as it does with the central investigation. Compellingly larger than life.

Edmonton Journal

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Alan Bradleys marvelous book The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a fantastic read, a winner. Flavia walks right off the page and follows me through my day. I can hardly wait for the next book. Bravo!

L OUISE P ENNY , bestselling author of The Brutal Telling and Bury Your Dead

A wickedly clever story, a dead-true and original voice, and an English country house in the summer: Alexander McCall Smith meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Please, please, Mr. Bradley, tell me well be seeing Flavia again soon?

L AURIE R. K ING , bestselling author of God of the Hive

Utterly charming! Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce proves to be one of the most precocious, resourceful, and, well, just plain dangerous heroines around. Evildoersand big sistersbeware!

L ISA G ARDNER , bestselling author of Live to Tell

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

M ARILYN S TASIO , The New York Times Book Review

Only those who dislike precocious young heroines with extraordinary vocabulary and audacious courage can fail to like this amazingly entertaining book. Expect more from the talented Bradley.

Booklist (starred review)

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

The Boston Globe

An elegant mystery.

The Plain Dealer

BY ALAN BRADLEY

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag

A Red Herring Without Mustard is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Alan Bradley

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

D ELACORTE P RESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Map by Simon Sullivan

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bradley, C. Alan

A red herring without mustard : a Flavia de Luce novel / Alan Bradley.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33986-1
1. GirlsEnglandFiction. 2. MurderInvestigationFiction. I. Title.
PR9199.4.B7324R43 2011
813.6dc22
2010042029

www.bantamdell.com

Jacket design: Joe Montgomery

v3.1

For John and Janet Harland

a cup of ale without a wench, why, alas, tis like an egg without salt or a red herring without mustard.

T HOMAS L ODGE AND R OBERT G REENE
A Looking Glasse, for London and Englande (1592)

ONE

Y OU FRIGHTEN ME , THE Gypsy said. Never have I seen my crystal ball so filled with darkness.

She cupped her hands around the thing, as if to shield my eyes from the horrors that were swimming in its murky depths. As her fingers gripped the glass, I thought I could feel ice water trickling down inside my gullet.

At the edge of the table, a thin candle flickered, its sickly light glancing off the dangling brass hoops of the Gypsys earrings, then flying off to die somewhere in the darkened corners of the tent.

Black hair, black eyes, black dress, red-painted cheeks, red mouth, and a voice that could only have come from smoking half a million cigarettes.

As if to confirm my suspicions, the old woman was suddenly gripped by a fit of violent coughing that rattled her crooked frame and left her gasping horribly for air. It sounded as though a large bird had somehow become entangled in her lungs and was flapping to escape.

Are you all right? I asked. Ill go for help.

I thought I had seen Dr. Darby in the churchyard not ten minutes earlier, pausing to have a word or two at each stall of the church fte. But before I could make a move, the Gypsys dusky hand had covered mine on the black velvet of the tabletop.

No, she said. No dont do that. It happens all the time.

And she began to cough again.

I waited it out patiently, almost afraid to move.

How old are you? she said at last. Ten? Twelve?

Eleven, I said, and she nodded her head wearily as though shed known it all along.

I seea mountain, she went on, almost strangling on the words, and the faceof the woman you will become.

In spite of the stifling heat of the darkened tent, my blood ran cold. She was seeing Harriet, of course!

Harriet was my mother, who had died in a climbing accident when I was a baby.

The Gypsy turned my hand over and dug her thumb painfully into the very center of my palm. My fingers spreadand then curled in upon themselves like the toes of a chickens severed foot.

She took up my left hand. This is the hand you were born with, she said, barely glancing at the palm, then letting it fall and picking up the other. and this is the hand youve grown.