The 11-year-old sleuth with a penchant for chemistry and a knack for discovering corpses triumphantly returns in this third installment of Bradley's award-winning mystery series (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie; The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag), once again finding herself in the middle of a murder investigation. The novel opens with the quintessential church fete in the English village of Bishop's Lacey. An old, cantankerous gypsy reads Flavia's palm, and her prognostications prove lethal. When local layabout and all-around shifty character Brookie Harewood is found murdered, what's a child prodigy to do? Flavia's deceased mother, Harriet, plays a part in this tale, as does the unsolved disappearance of a village baby who went missing years ago. -VERDICT Whether battling with her odious sisters or verbally sparing with the long-suffering Inspector Hewitt, our cheeky heroine is a delight. Full of pithy dialog and colorful characters, this series would appeal strongly to fans of Dorothy Sayers, Gladys Mitchell, and Leo Bruce as well as readers who like clever humor mixed in with their mysteries. [Library marketing; see Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/10.]-Amy Nolan, St. Joseph P.L., MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Oh, to be 11 again and pal around with irresistible wunderkind Flavia de Luce.Upset at a fortuneteller's words, Flavia upends a candle and, whoosh, the gypsy's tent goes up in flames. Determined to atone, especially since Fenella Faa has confided that years ago Flavia's father, the Colonel, once drove her and her husband off his Buckshaw estate, Flavia invites her onto the property, where she's soon attacked. And she's not the only one. Brookie Harewood, whom Flavia found fiddling around with Buckshaw antique fire irons in the library in the dead of night, is soon poked dead by a de Luce sterling-silver lobster fork on the estate's Trafalgar lawn. Determined to resolve these troubles and win the esteem of Inspector Hewitt, Flavia springs into full detecting mode, assaying chemicals in her laboratory, sidling up to suspects and making leading remarks, finding then losing Fenella's granddaughter Porcelain, reconsidering the claims of a certain Mrs. Bull about a gypsy stealing her child, sorting through an antiques scam, and researching the proclivities of the Hobblers, a mostly defunct religious sect. There's time left over, of course, to bedevil Daffy and Feely, her older sisters, and win the heart of everyone who's followed her earlier escapades (The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag, 2010, etc.).A splendid romp through 1950s England led by the world's smartest and most incorrigible preteen.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Stubborn, precocious Flavia de Luce seems old beyond her 11 years, but readers of her previous encounters with dead bodies and mystery know she has a vulnerable side, as well. Nowhere is that more visible than in her relationships with her distant father and her sisters, who constantly taunt her. In her latest adventure, the family is on the verge of bankruptcy. Father is auctioning his beloved stamps and selling the family silver. In the midst of this crisis, the irrepressible young snoop investigates the beating of a gypsy fortune-teller and the murder of a local thief, which seem somehow connected to a group of religious eccentrics, an antique shop, a missing baby, and a strange, fishy smell. Sound complicated? It is, but Bradley handles it so well you hardly notice. Buttressed by consistently quirky characters and an English country-village backdrop, Flavia's chatterbox narration reveals the amateur sleuth's obnoxiousness as well as her intellegence and irrepressible curiosity. The upshot is a spirited, surprisingly innocent tale, despite murky goings-on at its center. Think of Flavia as a new Sherlock in the making.--Zvirin, Stephanie Copyright 2010 Booklist

In Bradley's outstanding third Flavia de Luce mystery set in post-WWII rural England (after 2010's The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag), precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce and her family pursue their different interests. Flavia's widowed father, Col. Haviland de Luce, has his philately; 17-year-old sister Ophelia ("Feely"), her music; and 13-year-old sister Daphne ("Daffy"), her books. Flavia's escape is the old, elaborately equipped chemistry lab installed by her late great-uncle, Tarquin de Luce, in their Buckshaw estate. Flavia's discovery of an old Gypsy woman who's been attacked in her wagon sends the girl off on an investigation that will reveal more of Buckshaw's secrets as well as new information about Harriet, the mother Flavia never knew. In this marvelous blend of whimsy and mystery, Flavia manages to operate successfully in the adult world of crimes and passions while dodging the childhood pitfalls set by her sisters. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

It's getting harder and harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys in a modern western, of which Urban Waite's first novel, THE TERROR OF LIVING (Little, Brown, $24.99), is one fine specimen. Phil Hunt, thoughtfully described as "a good man, made up of all the bad things in the world," did a 10-year stretch in prison for killing a shopkeeper during a dumb robbery. But this flawed man was rescued by a strong woman who became his wife, and in the 20 years that Hunt has been out, they've made a quiet, decent life together on a small farm south of Seattle where they raise and board horses. The thing is, Hunt can't make a living without doing a little drug smuggling on the side. "It's not all cigarette boats and fancy parties," he tells a new recruit, referred to only as "the kid," while they make their laborious way up a mountain trail on packhorses to collect a delivery being dropped from a small plane. But their scheme is ruined by another good man, Deputy Bobby Drake, whose father, a former sheriff, is serving time for doing exactly what Hunt is doing. The kid is caught, the drugs are lost and, although Hunt manages to escape, he's now in deep trouble. You probably think you know where this story is going: Hunt will try to make up the loss by taking on a dangerous assignment that will go terribly wrong. A hired killer will be dispatched both to retrieve the goods, which are somewhere in the intestinal tract of a Vietnamese drug mule, and to get rid of Hunt. And be assured that Deputy Drake, still trying to prove he's a better man than his father, will show up to lend more drama to the manhunt. While Waite delivers the story you expect, he does it with more artistry than would seem possible in a conventional thriller. His descriptions of the stark beauty of the mountains have a calming effect on the intensity of the cinematic action scenes. And the surprising delicacy of the writing also makes it easier to bear the raw violence done to man and beast. Waite is most eloquent when he's probing the interior lives of the men locked in this contest of will and endurance. One minute it's Hunt, turning over memories of his prison days. Then it's Drake, remembering his father's face in the "church light filtering down through a patchwork of green forest branches." No matter who fails to survive, these characters all deserve to be mourned. On Sept. 16, 1920, a bomb exploded on Wall Street, killing more than 30 people and wounding hundreds. While that act of terrorism was never solved, Jed Rubenfeld gives it quite a good shot in his new thriller, THE DEATH INSTINCT (Riverhead, $26.95). There's real life in the street scenes, and historical figures like Mayor John F. Hylan, United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and the F.B.I. director William J. Flynn figure credibly in the ingeniously plotted investigation conducted by Rubenfeld's fictional detectives, Stratham Younger, a physician, lover and fighter of heroic proportions, and his down-to-earth partner, Jimmy Littlemore, a New York police officer. Being something of an overachiever, Rubenfeld doesn't allow his sleuths to stop once they've solved the bomb mystery. They must also thwart an assault on the Treasury, stop the industrial misuse of radium, travel to Vienna for a consultation with Sigmund Freud and avert a war between the United States and Mexico. For their next adventure, perhaps they should go looking for Judge Crater and, while they're at it, solve the mystery of life. Let a little boy out of your sight and he'll get into mischief. Take your eyes off a little girl and she's liable to turn into a detective - maybe an adorable snoop like Flavia de Luce, the 11-year-old heroine of A RED HERRING WITHOUT MUSTARD (Delacorte, $23) and two previous mysteries by the Canadian writer Alan Bradley. Given the run of the family's decrepit English estate by her widowed father and uncaring older sisters, Flavia has found sanctuary in the long-abandoned laboratory built by a Victorian ancestor. By applying the scientific knowledge she's acquired from reading authors like Pliny ("who had written some ripping stuff about poisons"), this precocious child confounds her elders by solving a bundle of crimes: the murder of a poacher, the disappearance of an infant, a brutal attack on an old Gypsy woman, and a string of thefts and forgeries of antiques. Even if Flavia's credibility as a sleuth diminishes with each turn of this tongue-in-cheek plot, she remains irresistibly appealing as a little girl lost. FADEAWAY GIRL (Viking, $26.95) may not be the ideal introduction to the adventures of 12-year-old Emma Graham, since the plot is too complicated to follow if you're not familiar with previous books in the semi-autobiographical series Martha Grimes has set in some nostalgic post-World War II time warp. Constant readers, however, should relish the latest chapter in Emma's efforts to unearth the secrets of the little town in western Maryland where her mother runs the decaying Hotel Paradise. Drawn by her runaway imagination to investigate crimes that have become part of local legend, Emma uses sheer cunning and devious methods of interrogation to pry information from the colorful characters she finds at well-trafficked spots like the Rainbow Cafe. They all quicken to life under Grimes's Dickensian touch, but none more so than Emma. She may keep losing herself in the past, but she's far too vital to fade away. The hero of Urban Waite's Western crime novel can't make a living without doing a little drug smuggling.