Book Review: Speaking From Among the Bones

Speaking From Among the Bones
by Alan Bradley
Pages: 378
Published by Delacorte Press
Publication Date February 5th 2013
Source: Bought
Genres: Mystery
Goodreads

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.

I have loved the Flavia de Luce novels in the past but found Speaking From Among the Bones to be lackluster.  I didn’t feel like there was much of a mystery element as there has been previously.  Alan Bradley seemed to go off on tangents and thought the death of Mr. Collicutt took a backseat only to be reminded of it at the novel’s end.

Even so, the tangents gave more of a back story and better understanding of the de Luce clan, with a conclusion that had me saying “no, this can’t be the end!”.

Overall, it was a decent novel but thought Speaking From Among the Bones was more filler than mystery.