A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley

This is the third book in Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce series. When it opens, young Flavia is at the local fair, having her fortune read. Then the gypsy fortune teller’s tent burns down, and Flavia goes with her in her caravan to show her where on the de Luce’s property she can camp. Later that night, Flavia saves her life after she is brutally attacked, and thus begins a chain of events involving the fortune-teller’s granddaughter Porcelain, a body impaled on a fountain, the unsolved disappearance of a child, and a fishy smell that lingers in the air…

The “whodunit” took a back seat for me in this book. Porcelain was a lot of fun, reminiscent of other young heroine’s adventurous sidekicks (such as Ilse from Emily of New Moon). Flavia’s family also seemed to play a larger role in this book. Her sisters are still mean to her and plague her with pranks, but at times I felt a hint of détente among them. Her father is still absent-minded, but seemed a bit more engaged with his daughters and what they were doing. Flavia also learns more about Harriet, her mother who was killed in a climbing accident when Flavia was too young to remember her, particularly when in the course of her investigations she comes across a painting of her mother.

A Red Herring Without Mustard is much the same as the first two books in the series. Flavia is charming and quirky and tears around town on her bike and gets into places she shouldn’t. I will be very interested to see where book #4 takes us. I expect more of Flavia’s charming amateur sleuthing, and I hope there will also be some further development of the family relationships. The Flavia de Luce website has announced that #4, titled I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, has a Christmas theme and therefore will be published this fall, in time for Christmas – so I will not have to wait long to find out!

This is 2/13 for me in the Canadian Book Challenge 5.