A Flavia de Luce Mystery
by Alan Bradley
From Dagger Awardwinning and internationally bestselling author Alan Bradley comes this utterly beguiling mystery starring one of fiction's most remarkable sleuths: Flavia de Luce, a dangerously brilliant eleven-year-old with a passion for chemistry and a genius for solving murders. This time, Flavia finds herself untangling two deathsseparated by time but linked by the unlikeliest of threads.
Flavia thinks that her days of crime-solving in the bucolic English hamlet of Bishops Lacy are overand then Rupert Porson has an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. The beloved puppeteer has had his own strings sizzled, but who'd do such a thing and why? For Flavia, the questions are intriguing enough to make her put aside her chemistry experiments and schemes of vengeance against her insufferable big sisters. Astride Gladys, her trusty bicycle, Flavia sets out from the de Luces' crumbling family mansion in search of Bishops Laceys deadliest secrets.
Does the madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood know more than shes letting on? What of the vicar's odd ministrations to the catatonic woman in the dovecote? Then theres a German pilot obsessed with the Brontë sisters, a reproachful spinster aunt, and even a box of poisoned chocolates. Most troubling of all is Porsons assistant, the charming but erratic Nialla. All clues point toward a suspicious death years earlier and a case the local constables can't solvewithout Flavias 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?
"While the plot at times stretches credulity, with some characters veering close to Agatha Christie stereotypes, Flavia is such an entertaining narrator that most readers will cheerfully go along for the ride." - Library Journal
"There's not a reader alive who wouldn't want to watch Flavia in her lab concocting some nefarious brew." - Kirkus Reviews
"Starred Review. Comic and irreverent, this entry is sure to build further momentum for the series." - Publishers Weekly
This information about The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Alan Bradley is the New York Times bestselling author of many short stories, children's stories, newspaper columns, and the memoir The Shoebox Bible. His first Flavia de Luce novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, received the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award, the Dilys Winn Award, the Arthur Ellis Award, the Agatha Award, the Macavity Award, and the Barry Award, and was nominated for the Anthony Award. His other Flavia de Luce novels are The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, A Red Herring Without Mustard, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Speaking from Among the Bones, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, and Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd, as well as the ebook short story "The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse."
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