Speaking From Among the Bones

I love Flavia de Luce.  If you haven't heard of Alan Bradley's frighteningly chemically knowledgeable young heroine with a penchant for stumbling across bodies in post WWII rural England (well, not actually stumbling - she does go out of her way to find the odd dead thing for her experiments, and if they happen to be human, she'll be the one to find our who did it, thank you very much!) you owe it to yourself to meet her.  Did I mention that Flavia is only eleven?  Speaking From Among the Bones (#264) is the fifth book in this endearing series, and it's Alan Bradley at the top of his game.

The five hundredth anniversary of the death of St. Tancred, buried in the local church at Bishop's Lacey, will be marked by the exhumation and examination of the saint's bones from the crypt, and Flavia is determined to be there.  When the crypt is opened, however, and Flavia is the only one small enough to crawl through the opening to scout the lay out, she finds that the tomb is occupied by a rather more recent body - that of the missing parish organist.  How did it wind up in the sealed tomb, and who would want to kill him anyway?  Of course, this isn't the only mystery revealed in Speaking From the Bones as family secrets are just tantalizingly out of Flavia's reach.  Finances are going from bad to worse at Buckshaw, her family's ancestral home, and it may mean the end of an era if the de Luces are forced to sell.  Flavia can't understand some of the emotional changes she's going through herself as she faces this reality.  She also accidentally uncovers secrets about her mother Harriet who disappeared while hiking in Tibet when Flavia was just an infant, as well as those of two other families connected with hers in the course of her investigation. Some things are just never spoken about in an English village. And just when Flavia thinks things might be looking up for her family, there's a shocking development that could change everything...

I stopped everything else I was doing to sit and read this book, and the hook at the end guarantees that I'll be waiting with bated breath for the next volume in this series to come out.  Curses on you, Alan Bradley! 

However, if you're new to Flavia de Luce, do yourself a favor and start back with the first book in this series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie or you'll miss a lot of the back story, and how far Flavia's come already. (See also my posts of 3/13/11 & 11/26/11.)  It might also make you think differently about just how far sibling rivalry can go even in the best of families.