Banished! is how twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce laments her predicament when her father and Aunt Felicity ship her off to Miss Bodycote's Female Academy, the boarding school that her mother attended across the sea in Canada. Yet the sun has not yet risen on Flavia's first day in captivity when a gift lands at her feet. And Flavia being Flavia, a budding chemist and sleuth, that gift is a charred and mummified body which tumbles out of a bedroom chimney....

"Colonel de Luce, in desperate need of funds, rents his beloved estate of Buckshaw over to a film company. They will be shooting a movie over the Christmas holidays, filming scenes in the stately manse with a famous and reclusive star. She is widely despised, so it is to no one's surprise when she turns up murdered, strangled by a length of film from her own movies! With the snow raging outside and Buckshaw locked in, the house is full of suspects....