Mystery Of The Sardine Pa

When an unknown black poodle inexplicably explodes in philosophy professor Timothy Chesterton-Brown's backyard-paralyzing the professor and killing his guest-we enter the mystery of the sardine. It is a mystery whose unwitting detectives are not trench-coated sleuths but, rather, include a twelve-year-old Oxonian mathematician named Ian, author of Euclid Was an Ass; his mother, Miss Prentice, a palmist; his beloved, Emma, daughter of the professor, for whom he names his most important postulate; a bureaucrat, Joseph Kszak, dubbed the Minister of Imponderabilia; the Great Man's widow and his secretary, affectionately known as the Dancing Ladies; and Lady Cooper, the aging daughter of a famous Polish general. The clues they unearth-drawing on philosophical logic, the occult, intuition, and everything in between-lead them far from the tiny seacoast town with the exploding poodle: we find them hunting in Majorca, Rome, Warsaw, and London. The solution ultimately lies, however, at the furthest and most magical reaches of reason, which can only be deduced by this mystery's most visionary detectives. Book jacket.