Best Book of the Week!
A Red Herring without Mustard is another of Alan Bradley’s delightful, comic mysteries featuring Flavia de Luce, the eleven-year-old detective and chemist.
In this book a mysterious gypsy woman is nearly beaten to death after Flavia allows her to camp on de Luce land. Something odd is going on. After Flavia surprises a neighborhood thug in the de Luce’s drawing room when everyone else is in bed, she finds him dead the next day, hanging from the trident of a fountain of Poseidon.
As usual, Flavia races all over the countryside on her bike Gladys, feuds with her sisters, consorts with her father’s shell-shocked batman, and tumbles into trouble in this novel, set in England just after World War II.
Bradley’s plots are implausibly complex, but it is not for the mysteries that I read these books but for the funny, irrepressible character of Flavia.
whatmeread 