Themis-Athena's Garden of Books

"'What's up, Dogger?' I asked lightly, trying to make it sound a little bit -- but not too much -- like Bugs Bunny."

Take note, Ms. Wright: This is how you do pop culture references -- you want them to have a topical and period adequate connection to whatever events you're in the process of describing.

And then, just a little later, we get to:

"Then there was curare.  It , too, had an almost instant effect and again, the victim died within minutes by asphyxiation.  But curare could not kill by ingestion; to be fatal, it had to be injected.  Besides that, who in the English countryside -- besides me, of course -- would be likely to carry curare in his kit?"

Flavia is 11.

And a certain teenage boy comes to mind whose story Kathryn Harkup tells in A Is for Arsenic ... and who, like Flavia, also owned his first chemistry set before he'd actually turned "-teen" and used it to poison his stepmother.  I guess it's a good thing Flavia is the narrator and heroine of this series ...