Alan Bradley's A Red Herring Without Mustard

Oh, Alan Bradley ... you've done it again! The third Flavia de Luce book, A Red Herring Without Mustard, started out a little slower than the first two for me ... the flow didn't seem as easy. Shortly after I had stated as much in my Teaser Tuesday post it picked up and kept going and going and kept me guessing the whole way through.

Flavia is still obsessed with chemistry and still eleven and still wise beyond her years ... in some ways. I think this time more than the first two installments, though, we get to see a little more about how much of a little girl she still is.

She's still tortured by her two older sisters -- physically and emotionally.

*****

She still has her trusty companion, Gladys -- her mother's old bicycle:

She can still always rely on the family jack-of-all-trades, Dogger, to be there for her:

Her relationship with her emotionally distant father seems to be improving ... albeit still more a distant closeness than an up-close-and-personal one:

And, of course, she still stumbles into murder investigations!

(Yes, I mustard-ed out the victim's identity. Spoilers, you know.)

As always, Inspector Hewitt is there to investigate ... or, at least, to assist Flavia in her investigations, although not always answering her questions (and, in turn, not always answering his):

Ah yes ... I, too, adore Hewitt and I still adore Flavia and as the book progressed I adored the whole tale. We got to meet new neighbors, revisit characters from past books, dig deeper into the mystery that was her mother (whom I'm still not totally convinced actually died on that mountain when Flavia was a baby), and see Flavia discover more about herself.

The next book, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, has a Christmas theme to it according to the GoodReads write-up so you can expect me to ramble about that (or, at the very least, take a bunch of screen caps of it) some time in December. I'm already excited!!!