A delightful, witty, and engrossing mystery -- finishing it took up a whole morning when I meant to be doing Productive Things. 
 Flavia de Luce, only 11, rides a bike named Gladys that she pretends is a horse, and picks locks with parts of her braces. And when she catches a cold, she uses her chemistry lab to combine chicken broth and baking soda for the ultimate combination cure. Rock on! 
 Favorite quotes: 
 "What intrigued me more than anything was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation -- all of it! -- was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was real stability." 
 "It is a simple fact of Nature that I happen to possess acute hearing: the kind of hearing, Father once told me, that allows its owner to hear spiderwebs clanging like horseshoes against the walls." 
 "I knew instantly, too, that Father had just told a lie, and suddenly, without warning, somewhere inside me, a little thread broke. It felt as if I had just aged a little and something old had snapped." 
 "Oh, scissors!" (said as a curse) 
 "It occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No...eight days a week." 
 (after smelling her mother's perfume) "A peculiar feeling passed over me -- or, rather, through me, as if I were an umbrella remembering what it felt like to pop open in the rain." 
 "It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.'"