The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

Flavia de Luce, a dangerously smart eleven-year-old with a passion for chemistry and a genius for solving murders, thinks that her days of crime-solving in the bucolic English hamlet of Bishops Lacey are over-until beloved puppeteer Rupert Porson has his own strings sizzled in an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. But who'd do such a thing, andwhy? Does the madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood know more than shes letting on? What about Porsonrs"s charming but erratic assistant? All clues point toward a suspicious death years earlier and a case the local constables canrs"t solve-without Flaviars help. But in getting so close to whos secretly pulling the strings of this dance of death, has our precocious heroine finally gotten in way over her head?

Alan Bradley received the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, as well as the first Saskatchewan Writers Guild Award for Children’s Literature. He is the author of many short stories, children’s stories, newspaper columns, and the memoir The Shoebox Bible. Bradley lives in Malta with his wife and two calculating cats, and is currently working on the next Flavia de Luce mystery, A Red Herring Without Mustard.


From the Hardcover edition.