Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d by Alan BradleyIt’s mystery time and Flavia de Luce is back! Called a combination of Eloise and Sherlock Holmes by Boston Globe reviewers, Flavia continues to grow-up in rural Bishop’s Lacey, England with a love of chemistry and an affinity for encountering dead bodies.
This time, in Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d by Alan Bradley, she sets off to
deliver a message and finds Roger Sambridge hanging upside down and dead on the
back of his bedroom door. Setting off to impress local Inspector Hewitt, Flavia
is determined to solve the mystery and distract herself from her father’s
illness, all while sharing numerous wry musings with the readers. To me, Flavia’s entertaining observations are
some of the best moments in Bradley’s award winning books:
- On monosyllabic: “Why, incidentally, does a word meaning ‘a single syllable’ require a five-syllable word to describe it?”
- On the winter landscape: “‘Rather like Good King Wenceslas, isn’t it?’ I said, ticking off the points on my mittened fingers (which isn’t as easy as it sounds).”
Another gentle mystery set in England
is Death of an Avid Reader by Frances Brody. During the 1920’s, private
detective Kate Shackleton takes a case to search for the illegitimate daughter
of a wealthy, but dying, aristocrat. As
her inquiries continue, a body is found in the local library basement and an
itinerant peddler, Umberto, is blamed.
Questions
abound: Who was the child’s father? Is the library haunted? What motive was
there for the murder? Will an innocent
man be convicted? Kate and her sidekick, ex-policeman Jim Sykes, seek the
answers in book six of the series. A good match for fans of Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs or Charles
Todd’s Bess Crawford. Please let us
know if you have a mystery to recommend.
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