A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley is the third in a series of mystery novels featuring precocious eleven year old amateur detective Flavia de Luce. Despite the age of the protagonist, the books are written for an adult audience, although they do have great crossover appeal. They’ve garnered a lot of acclaim, and it’s well deserved. Even if you’re not particularly interested in mysteries, if you like a quirky character, you’d enjoy reading about Flavia’s adventures.

Flavia is a special sort of child. She’s more interested in her dead uncle Tarquin’s chemistry laboratory than any other more normal childish pursuit (although she does enjoy flitting about the town on her bicycle, Gladys). Her specialty is poisons, and she often uses these (non-fatally, of course) against her two older sisters as vengeance for their mean-spirited pranks. (Let’s be honest, sometimes it’s not vengeance for anything, sometimes it’s just to torment them.) She also has a penchant for discovering dead bodies, and like any good character in a mystery novel, she ensures she’s involved in solving the crime.

Flavia lives with her sisters and father (her mother died when she was a baby in a climbing accident) in 1950s England, in the de Luce family’s sprawling estate of Buckshaw. Her father’s been a bit remote since the death of her mother, and her two sisters, while once close to her, now make it a habit of torturing her (a favorite taunt is that Flavia is a changeling, a fairy swapped out for the real human child as a baby). Buckshaw sits in a peculiar little English town called Bishop’s Lacey – a town full of colorful characters and an alarming number of murders. The town and time period lend the stories much of their charm.

What makes these books truly entertaining is Flavia’s voice. She’s got a tremendous amount of character and it’s remarkable that Bradley, a grown man, is able to write her voice so convincingly. It helps that Flavia is very deliberately not your typical eleven year old. She’s resourceful, cheeky, intelligent beyond her years, and treats adults as her peers. She’s also frequently selfish, petulant, mean-spirited, and foolish. Despite all that (or perhaps because of these failings), she’s also always likable. As a reader, I never felt left behind by Flavia’s sleuthing nor did I find that I was miles ahead of her. She treats the reader as her confidant and makes numerous (often very amusing) asides that allow us to get into her head.

A Red Herring Without Mustard involves a gypsy, a lost baby, and a ring of forgers. Its predecessor, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, finds Flavia investigating the death of a famous puppeteer, and the first in the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, involves a dead philatelist (that’s stamp collector to the uninitiated) on Buckshaw’s lawn. The mysteries are all good, by which I mean they always make sense, there are not gaping plot holes, and they move along at a fair clip without forcing the reader to slog through boring bits. They’re also different than what you tend to find in your usual mystery fare (dead lovers and the like). So while each book is rather long, clocking in at 400 pages or more, they never feel so and can be read in a couple lazy afternoons.

Each book is a distinct mystery unto itself, so they can theoretically be read out of order, but I wouldn’t recommend it. One of Bradley’s talents as a storyteller is to let his characters grow from book to book. Flavia’s relationships with her father and sisters change over the course of the three novels, as does her understanding of her mother and the people in Bishop’s Lacey. By the end of the third novel, I was left with the knowledge that the de Luce family dynamic is much more complex (and therefore richer) than I realized in the first novel.

I’ve heard that the audios are really good with spot-on narration for Flavia’s voice. I think these are books that would do well on re-read (or re-listen) – even though I know whodunnit, there’s enough humor in Flavia’s irresistible voice to keep me interested a second time around.