This latest entry in the series about 11 year old Flavia deLuce, girl chemist and intrepid solver of mysteries, features a satisfying story and a surprising ending. These books should definitely be read in order:

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag
A Red Herring Without Mustard
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
Speaking From Among the Bones
The Dead In Their Vaulted Arches (due out January, 2014)

However, I think I missed the fourth book somehow, and I still enjoyed this fifth one. In Speaking from Among the Bones, Flavia is determined to make her presence known when the authorities unearth the bones of Bishop Lacey’s resident saint, St. Tancred, who’s been dead for 500 years. But before the assembled company get to the bones of St. Tancred, there’s another, more modern, corpse to be disinterred. And Flavia is off on another investigation into chemistry and death in the 1950’s village near her ancestral home of Buckshaw where Flavia performs experiments in her great-uncle Tarquin DeLuce’s marvelous and well-stocked laboratory.

As the series continues, we realize more and more that our first impressions of Flavia’s family of her village friends, seen exclusively through Flavia’s own peculiar 11 year old filter, may not be entirely accurate. It’s a voyage of discovery, as Flavia realizes that perhaps her father has depths that are beyond her understanding and that perhaps her sisters Daffy and Feely do love her in their own ways, and that perhaps the other village people, both friends and enemies, are more multi-dimensional than she may have led us to believe initially. I really like this aspect of gradually opening up relationships and characters through the eyes of a very opinionated and somewhat precocious child. It’s a lovely way to show characters in all their messiness, especially with the added dimension of murder and mayhem to solve and resolve in each of the books.

Good series, and I was totally blindsided by the ending of this installment in the series–not the solution of the murder mystery, but rather an astonishing and unexpected development in Flavia’s own personal family life that sets us up for an interesting sixth book, due out in January 2014.