The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan BradleyDelacorte Press (Penguin Random House), 2014

The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches is the sixth mystery by Alan Bradley featuring Flavia de Luce, a precocious eleven-year-old fond of chemistry and crime-solving, but it’s a bit less of a mystery than the others. There is a death, practically at the start of the book (a stranger gives Flavia a message to pass on to her father, and then is pushed under a train), but Flavia’s energies aren’t really directed toward solving it: she’s too busy dealing with a major upheaval at home. Flavia never knew her mother, Harriet: she disappeared in the Himalayas when Flavia was about a year old, and has long been presumed dead. But now her body has been found and is being returned home for a funeral and burial, and Flavia finds that having a certainly-dead mother feels different from having a presumed-dead mother. Meanwhile, there are some mysterious things: Winston Churchill himself arrives with Harriet’s body, and there’s that message from the stranger, and also the arrival of a cousin from Cornwall who was apparently talking to the stranger just before he died, all of which make Flavia wonder what the stranger was talking about, what exactly her mother was up to in the Himalayas, and whether her death was really an accident. But even that mystery feels less central to the book than Flavia’s attempts to deal with the emotions brought up by the return of her mother’s body: at one point she decides she’s going to try to resurrect Harriet, which is awful and squirm-inducing: it feels like Flavia must know it won’t ever work (and would be a pretty terrible idea regardless), but she’s not ready to let go of the possibility of knowing her mother. Meanwhile, Flavia’s relationship to her father, and even to her sisters, with whom she normally spars quite a lot, takes a turn toward tenderness in this book, and it feels like Flavia is becoming more self-aware and aware of others, which adds depth and heart to the narrative.