The Golden Tresses of the Dead, by Alan Bradley, is the tenth novel featuring precocious detective and chemist, Flavia de Luce. In this outing, Flavia is adjusting to her new role as (12-year-old) mistress of the family mansion and as partner in her newly formed Arthur W. Dogger & Associates, Discreet Investigations, with long-time family retainer, Dogger. So this is, of courses, the perfect moment for her sister to find a severed human finger in her wedding cake and a guest to ask her to find some missing letters.
Like the other novels in the series, The Golden Tresses of the Dead is a lightning fast read. Flavia’s delightfully ghoulish eagerness to investigate drives the novel like a locomotive. (Much to the dismay of the local police detective.) She rides her trusty bicycle, Gladys, while cheerfully singing songs she’s not supposed to know as she crosses the county in search of clues. Now that I think about it, this is kind of an indecently cheerful novel given how many people die in this book. That said, Flavia makes this book a hell of a lot of fun to read.
By the end, Flavia and her partner Dogger have uncovered a twisted scam based on homeopathy, involving a dodgy patent medicine manufacturer, a pair of possibly faux-missionaries, and the most terrifying woman in the village of Bishop’s Lacey. To say anything else would ruin the joy of trying to work out the mystery along with Flavia, so I’ll just sign off by saying that fans of the series will relish this new episode. The only problem is that these novels are so quick to read that the wait for the next novel to be published seems even longer.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
I haven’t heard of this series before!