Mystery's youngest mad scientist is back on the case (accompanied by her intrepid bicycle, Gladys) in A Red Herring Without Mustard (Random House, 399 pp.). When we meet up with the 11-year-old poison specialist and budding detective in her third outing, Flavia de Luce is in the process of having her fortune told. (She also inadvertently sets the fortuneteller's tent on fire.) Later on, she saves the woman's life when Flavia finds her beaten in her caravan.
It's too late, however, for local ne'er-do-well Brookie Harewood, who was offed with a lobster fork from the de Luce family silver. (This is the same silver Flavia's cash-strapped, widowed father is in the process of selling.) This isn't the first time a dead body has appeared on the Buckshaw estate, and Flavia is determined to crack the case before her hero, Inspector Hewitt.
Award-winning writer Alan Bradley balances his cast of eccentrics and his heroine's precocity with the dignified privations of post-World War II British gentry and the emotional poverty of Flavia's home life. “Not once in my 11 years could I recall him praising me, and now that he had done so, I hadn't the faintest idea how to respond,” she says of her philatelist father. (De Luces, needless to say, do not hug.)
When she's not solving crimes or dissolving her late mother's jewelry in great-uncle Tarquin's Victorian laboratory, she's doing battle against her two toxic older sisters. The idea of a girl detective may conjure up memories of a certain Riverside High teen, but prickly, brilliant Flavia has little in common with Nancy Drew besides the color of her hair.
