Another hilarious Amelia Peabody mystery. I love this series, but I'm afraid this one doesn't get five stars because I felt the character development went a little off-kilter. At some points, each of the characters behaves in an annoying manner, making you want to shake them. Of course, this is true in every normal family, so perhaps I'm not seeing the true vision of Ms. Peters work -- to display a normal family with normal variability of personalities cooperating together to do important things. But I think I'll leave the four stars, because I've always disliked a mystery book where the character does something out of character to advance the author's idea of where the plot should go. And at one point, all the characters here do something intensely stupid that leads them into danger -- and they're not stupid people. Then again, I think of myself as intelligent, but I recently did something intensely stupid that landed me in the hospital. Maybe I'm being too hard on Ms. Peters. If I could give this a 4.5, I would.