Flavia de Luce 02; The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag

✍ Scribed by Bradley, Alan

• Book ID: 107839372
• Publisher: [Côte d’Azur]
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 246 KB
• Series: Flavia de Luce 2
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

The story opens with the immortal words “I was lying dead in the churchyard” (spoken, astonishingly, by Flavia herself) and ends with a funeral watched by the De Luce family on a newly-installed television set. Inbetween, Alan Bradley weaves a hauntingly nightmarish tale that involves Punch & Judy – and in particular Mr Punch’s nemesis, the hangman, Jack Ketch – a frighteningly realistic puppet show, and a hitherto unexplored corner of Bishop’s Lacey known as Gibbet’s Wood. The plot, beginning with the arrival in Bishop’s Lacey of a travelling puppet show, features a grisly murder during a performance of Jack and the Beanstalk in the village hall and reaches back to an earlier, even nastier crime centring on an ancient, rotting gibbet that has lain like a shadow over the village for years. For Flavia, undoing the complex knot that ties these strands together will test her precocious powers of deduction to the limit – and provide a shocking insight into some of the darker corners of the adult world.