Inguling

I received this seventh book about young Flavia de Luce, amateur sleuth, brilliant chemist, from Netgalley as an ARC. Truth be told I requested it especially as I devoured the first six Flavia books in about a week.

In this book we find Flavia on a boat on her way to Toronto, Canada to attend Miss Bodycote’s boarding school only a short while after burying her mother and finding out she had inherited Buckshaw from her. Overseeing Flavia are a Canadian couple, Dr. and Mrs. Rainsmith

whom Flavia dislikes. I feel like this book and the one before it saw Flavia more on the cusp of growing up, saying goodbye to her mother and then moving away from home and to another country. She feels homesick and tears well up at time, it’s not what I got used to from Flavia from the first few books but it is very realistic; she is so young and she has gone through so much in the past few weeks of her life. Thankfully a body comes crashing down the chimney in Flavia’s room at school only a few hours after she arrives. I say thankfully because it gives Flavia something else to think about. Flavia also finds out that girls have been going missing from the school and nobody is doing anything about it and she finds out that the school is not all that it seems, the mysterious Nide seems somehow implicated.

It was enjoyable to see Flavia in another environment than at Buckshaw, it was time to move the series to a new location because the endless bodies piling up around Bishops Lacey were beginning to seem a bit odd. As ever I’m impatiently looking forward to the next instalment.