A Fine And Private Place

"The world's greatest adolescent British chemist/busybody/sleuth" (The Seattle Times), Flavia de Luce, returns in a twisty new mystery novel from award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Alan Bradley. In the wake of an unthinkable family tragedy, twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce is struggling to fill her empty days. For a needed escape, Dogger, the loyal family servant, suggests a boating trip for Flavia and her two older sisters. As their punt drifts past the church where a notorious vicar had recently dispatched three of his female parishioners by spiking their communion wine with cyanide, Flavia, an expert chemist with a passion for poisons, is ecstatic. Suddenly something grazes against her fingers as she dangles them in the water. She clamps down on the object, imagining herself as Ernest Hemingway battling a marlin, and pulls up what she expects will be a giant fish. But in Flavia's grip is something far better: a human head, attached to a human body. If anything could take Flavia's mind off sorrow, it is solving a murder—although one that may lead the young sleuth to an early grave.

Jonathan Rebeck is homeless. Bankrupt. He has dropped out of society and has been living quietly in a local cemetery, under the care of a raven who is quite good at stealing sandwiches. Far from being lonely, however, Jonathan is able to converse with the ghosts around him, and finds himself following two new spirits, Michael and Laura, as they fall in love with each other. He becomes invested in, and part of, their cautious romance. But the circumstances behind Michael's death are slipping from his memory, and the further from life they drift, the closer the loss of love feels. When a visiting widow stumbles across Jonathan in his graveyard home, will the living world begin to intrude on this fine and private place? Peter S. Beagle's legendary, beautiful debut novel is filled with all his characteristic warmth and humanity. With a new introduction by Neil Gaiman, A Fine and Private Place is a timeless classic from the author of The Last Unicorn.

As Sandro gets to grips with the dispiriting realities of life as a private detective, an old case comes back to haunt him ... Once the subject of a routine investigation back in Sandro's police-officer days, Loni Meadows is found dead in circumstances Sandro cannot convince himself are accidental.

A Fine and Private Place centers on the insular world of Jonathan Rebeck, who, following the failure of his business, rejected his place in society in order to live for twenty years within the quiet of a Bronx cemetery. With only a sardonic raven and a pair of increasingly regretful ghosts as companions. Rebeck has forgotten what life is really about. That is until a lonely widow visits the mausoleum where her late husband - and Rebeck - reside, giving the reclusive Rebeck the courage to perform the most magnanimous gesture of his misspent life.

An enigmatic men, whose poems balance opposing principles-Royalism and Republicanism, spirituality and sexuality.