Book Review: Speaking from Among the Bones by Alan Bradley

Title: Speaking from Among the Bones: a Flavia de Luce Novel by Alan Bradley
Published January 29, 2013; Delacorte Press hardcover
Genre: mystery
Source: library

The face of a carved wooden imp grinned at me saucily in the shadows. I touched his puffed-out polished cheeks and gave them a twist.
There was a click and the panel slid open.
I stepped carefully inside.
(ch. 13)

Flavia de Luce, the young chemist and amateur sleuth, turns age 12 and begins to be taken more seriously by her older sisters, who used to tease her horribly, telling her she was adopted or a foundling. Her distracted father tells her that she is a "genius" like her mother, who died years ago in a mountaineering accident in the Himalayas.

Flavia, traveling around on a rickety bicycle she named Gladys, goes on to solve the murder of an organist at their church in the English village of Bishop's Lacy, and in so doing, unearths a mystery surrounding the local saint, St. Tancred, who may be an early ancestor of her family, the de Luces.

I liked this book as much as the first in the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, which won the author the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award, the Agatha Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, the Arthur Ellis Award, the Macavity Award, and the Spotted Owl Award.