Speaking From Among the Bones

Locations
Call Number: BOCD Mystery, Adult BOCD / Fiction / Mystery / Bradley, C. Alan
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	BOCD Mystery	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult A/V 4-week checkout	Adult BOCD / Fiction / Mystery / Bradley, C. Alan	4-week checkout	Due 04-29-2024

Compact discs.
Read by Jayne Entwistle.
Eleven-year-old amateur detective and ardent chemist Flavia de Luce is used to digging up clues, whether they're found among the potions in her laboratory or between the pages of her insufferable sisters' diaries. What she is not accustomed to is digging up bodies. Upon the five-hundredth anniversary of St. Tancred's death, the English hamlet of Bishop's Lacey is busily preparing to open its patron saint's tomb. Nobody is more excited to peek inside the crypt than Flavia, yet what she finds will halt the proceedings dead in their tracks: the body of Mr. Collicutt, the church organist, his face grotesquely and inexplicably masked. Who held a vendetta against Mr. Collicutt, and why would they hide him in such a sacred resting place? The irrepressible Flavia decides to find out. And what she unearths will prove there's never such thing as an open-and-shut case.

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Young Detective Solves the Case submitted by Jen Chapin-Smith on July 13, 2013, 11:49pm In this latest of the Flavia de Luce mystery series, our young genius discovers a corpse in a grave, but not the one that's meant to be there. This corpse is of the church's organist, who has only been missing a few weeks.

Flavia de Luce, who lives with her father and two older sisters in the fictional English town of Bishop's Lacey (which has a shockingly high murder rate) in the 1950s, solves crime after crime in this series for young readers. The police do not appreciate her intrusions, although she usually solves the case for them. This time, Flavia has again inserted herself into the middle of the town's events, the opening of the grave of St Tancred, for whom the village church is named.

As she investigates, Flavia spends a lot of time in the graveyard and even inside the graves, which brings about rather disgusting descriptions of rotting corpses and grave wax. This book is not for the faint of heart, or at least the faint of stomach.

I very much appreciated having a young female character demonstrate so much intelligence and bravery, something I find lacking in many novels for children. Readers should note, however, that as it is set in the 1950s, the Flavia series does demonstrate the prejudices of the era, including sexism and xenophobia.