WHAT TIME THE SEXTON'S SPADE DOTH RUST

Rejoice, fans of fiction’s youngest franchise detective: Flavia de Luce is back after a five-year hiatus, and she hasn’t aged a bit.

Flavia’s never been more alone. Her beloved father, Col. Haviland de Luce, has died, leaving her an orphan; her sister Ophelia is off on the grand tour with her bridegroom; and her sister Daffy (Daphne to the uninitiated) is bound for Oxford. Flavia would be entirely on her own if it weren’t for her father’s war comrade Arthur W. Dogger, now a gardener who’s accepted 11-year-old Flavia as a full partner in his detective agency; her orphaned cousin, Undine; and Margaret Mullet, the cook at Buckshaw, the de Luce home in Bishop’s Lacey. And Flavia may be about to lose this last companion, because when her neighbor, retired civil servant Maj. Tommy Greyleigh, suddenly dies, Insp. Hewitt thinks that Mrs. Mullet fed him a dish of poisonous mushrooms. Since Flavia knows more about poisons than anyone else alive in 1952, she eagerly jumps to the defense of Mrs. Mullet, who’s questioned and released. But that’s not enough for Flavia, who’s become convinced that Maj. Greyleigh was assassinated on the orders of Asterion, a shadowy figure in that equally shadowy intelligence force, the Nide, where Flavia’s father and her aunt Felicity once reportedly worked. No one remotely associated with the Nide, or with the nearby American service base at Leathcote, will utter a word about the dread Asterion, so it’s up to Flavia to smash every taboo in her quest for truth, justice, and diversion.

Nobody could possibly unite intelligence work, mythological monsters, and village gossip as adroitly as Bradley’s heroine.