The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag

Flavia De Luce is a precocious, motherless, 11 year-old amateur sleuth living in a crumbling country pile with her philatelist father and two spiteful older sisters in the early 1950s.

When a celebrity puppeteer is stranded in her village, he puts on a show for the locals which ends in a grisly murder. Flavia uses her dogged determination, extraordinary powers of deduction and detailed knowledge of forensic chemistry to track down the killer and connect the crime to the tragic death of a young boy several years earlier.

With extensive cultural references and descriptions of the minutiae of chemical procedures, this is definitely a book for the committed reader but those prepared to immerse themselves in Flavia’s world will be rewarded with intricate plotting and plenty of wry humour.