Even the title of this book is delicious! It works on so many levels. I loved the cover, looking down the body between the two feet. It's an impossible angle, unless, of course, someone's dead.
The vast majority of middle grade "mysteries" don't feature dead bodies, at all. The main characters investigate all sorts of mysteries, but generally not murders, per se, so this was a wonderful departure!
And we loved the main character, Aggie, who finds the body under the piano and is totally nonplussed by it -- in fact, she takes time to note the foam at the edges of the victim's mouth and wonder about the scrap of paper still clutched in the victim's hand.
When Aggie can escape her nursemaid, Charlotte, who's flirting with the Constable, she works with a Belgium boy, Hector Perot, to follow the clues.
While waiting for a morning dance lesson, and after realizing she left her poem from the night before's public reading on the piano, Aggie slips into the room and discovers the very suddenly dead (although long-standingly unpleasant) Mrs. Eversham.
At this point, the reader's already gotten most of the clues needed to crack the case, even when it looks like everyone in the village of Torquay (of turn of the century, 1902) disliked the victim, strongly. It's just a matter of Aggy and Hector putting together the clues in the right sequence to reveal the murderer.
There are a couple of red herrings, of course, and the murderer is not who you'd expect.
Looking forward to more murderous fun from these two characters. Great for upper middle grade readers!
