The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
A Flavia de Luce Mystery
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From Dagger Award-winning 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 deaths — separated by time but linked by the unlikeliest of threads.
Flavia thinks that her days of crime-solving in the bucolic English hamlet of Bishop's Lacy are over — and then Rupert Porson has an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. The beloved puppeteer has had his own strings sizzled, but who would 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 Bishop's Lacey's deadliest secrets.
Does the madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood know more than she's letting on? What of the vicar's odd ministrations to the catatonic woman in the dovecote? Then there's a German pilot obsessed with the Bronte sisters, a reproachful spinster aunt, and even a box of poisoned chocolates. Most troubling of all is Porson's assistant, the charming but erratic Nialla. All clues point toward a suspicious death years earlier and a case the local constables can't solve — without Flavia's help. But in getting so close to who's secretly pulling the strings of this dance of death, has our precocious heroine finally gotten in way over her head?
About this Author
Alan Bradley is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven Flavia de Luce mystery novels and the memoir The Shoebox bible. His first Flavia novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, received the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award, the Dilys 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, Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd, The Grave's a Fine and Private Place, and The Golden Tresses of the Dead, as well as the ebook short story "The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse." Originally from Toronto, he now lives and writes on an island in the middle of the Irish Sea.
Reviews
Selected praise for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
"One of the hottest reads of 2009."
--The Times (U.K.)
"Sure in its story, pace and voice, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie deliciously mixes all the ingredients of great storytelling. The kind of novel you can pass on to any reader knowing their pleasure is assured."
--Andrew Pyper, acclaimed author of The Killing Circle
"A wickedly clever story, a dead true and original voice, and an English country house in the summer: Alexander McCall Smith meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Please, please, Mr. Bradley, tell me we will be seeing Flavia again soon?"
--Laurie R. King, bestselling author of The Game
"Alan Bradley brews a bubbly beaker of fun in his devilishly clever, wickedly amusing debut mystery, launching an eleven-year-old heroine with a passion for chemistry--and revenge! What a delightful, original book!"
--Carolyn Hart, award-winning author of Death Walked In
"Alan Bradley's marvelous book, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, is a fantastic read, a winner. Flavia walks right off the page and follows me through my day. I can hardly wait for the next book. Bravo."
--Louise Penny, acclaimed author of Still Life
"The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is an absolute treat. It is original, clever, entertaining and funny. Bradley, whose biography suggests he did not spend a great deal of time in 1950s rural England where his novel is set, has captured a moment in time perfectly."
--Material Witness (e-zine)
"If ever there were a sleuth who's bold, brilliant, and, yes, adorable, it's Flavia de Luce, the precocious 11-year-old at the center of this scrumptious first novel. . . . Her sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, and the loyal family retainer, Dogger, are among the book's retinue of outstanding characters."
--USA Today
"Oh how astonishing and pleasing is genuine originality! . . . I simply cannot recall the last time I so enjoyed being in the company of a first-person narrator. . . . This is a book which triumphantly succeeds in its objectives of charming and delighting. And on top of that it is genuinely original."
--Reviewing the Evidence (e-zine)
"Like just about everybody else I've been reading--just finished reading, in fact--Alan Bradley's altogether admirable The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. It made me very happy, for all kinds of reasons: for its humour, for the wonderful invention of the eleven-year-old chemist-detective Flavia de Luce, for its great attention to period detail, and mostly because it was so deft and assured, from top to tail."
--The Globe and Mail
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