She lives! It's been a solid three-and-a-half months since I posted anything around here, and I've decided it's high time to dust off my feeble little book blog and go on a tear to try to catch it up before the end of the year.
Starting with the third installment of the Flavia de Luce series. This was the book I took with me and finished reading on our amazing trip to Alaska, and I think overall I liked it better than Bradley's second Flavia book but still not as much as The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.
A Red Herring Without Mustard opens at a church fête where Flavia is having her fortune told by a gypsy. Flavia is so disturbed by what the gypsy is saying that she accidentally burns down the tent and as a result of this, invites the gypsy to set her caravan up at an out of the way spot on the Buckshaw estate. She later discovers the woman nearly bludgeoned to death and obviously decides she needs to get to the bottom of it. But then the gypsy's granddaughter Porcelain Lee shows up and both girls stumble upon a corpse in another part of the Buckshaw property. Suddenly Flavia finds herself in the middle of a second investigation. Are the two incidents connected?
The red herrings sure do pile up and I had a time keeping it all straight. As I mentioned, I liked A Red Herring Without Mustard better than The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag, but both novels failed to live up to the charm of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. I like that Bradley is gradually developing Flavia's character more and filling out her personal life. But I don't love how sad her life is. The sibling rivalry she's steeped in with her two older sisters was funny at first, but now it's almost disturbing. I liked how Dr. Darby and Inspector Hewitt try to care for Flavia in this novel after she witnesses two truly horrific crime scenes, but it also highlights how clueless her father is in his care of all three of his daughters. Flavia's infatuation with Inspector Hewitt's pretty wife is sweet but also heartbreaking when you stop to think about how tormented this little motherless girl is by her older sisters. And her would-be friendship with Porcelain Lee just brings attention to how lonely Flavia's life is. There are glimmers throughout of some positive family dynamics and I think Bradley is building to something really compelling. It will be interesting to see how it plays out over the series, but boy, it's not always light reading despite Flavia's consistently whip-smart, hilarious inner dialogue and all the murder mystery shenanigans she gets up to.
On a readerly note, the chapters are long and, as the title suggests, red herrings abound. I started taking this book to work with me at the end of January but quickly gave up trying to read it on my breaks. This one doesn't lend itself to reading in small snippets (at least not the way my brain works), and I didn't really get back into it until we left for our cruise in May and I had plenty of time to read.
Also, on a weird note (considering that the Flavia books are all about death), I ended up finishing this book a week before the author Alan Bradley passed away. He was 87 years old.
In sum, a solid installment in the now twelve-book series (the final book is set to come out this November), and I'm looking forward to my next adventure with Flavia though it may be a couple more years before I get around to it.
Who's your favorite fictional sleuth?
