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The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
423 pages
A delightfully macabre romp through a 1950s English village, guided by a brilliant, poison-obsessed eleven-year-old.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like stepping into a decaying English manor house where the tea is hot but might just be laced with cyanide. The experience is anchored entirely by its fiercely intelligent, unapologetically morbid eleven-year-old narrator, whose erudite voice and passion for chemistry give the classic village mystery a delightfully sharp edge. The pace is brisk and energetic, propelled by our heroine's tireless bicycling and snooping, while the mood balances cozy 1950s nostalgia with a distinctly macabre sensibility. Beneath the wry humor and eccentric cast of puppeteers, madwomen, and weary vicars lies a surprisingly tender exploration of family dysfunction and lingering grief. It is a perfect treat for readers who love their traditional whodunits served with a generous dash of dark wit and precocious charm.
- Mood
- cozy-yet-macabre
- eccentric
- nostalgic
- autumnal
- Tone
- wry
- precocious
- darkly comedic
- unsentimental
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- decaying aristocracy · hidden village secrets · sibling rivalry · lingering trauma
- The writing
- Sparkling, erudite, and laced with delicious chemical metaphors and sharp-tongued observations.
- The arc
- A delightfully morbid romp that gradually reveals the poignant, hidden tragedies beneath a quirky village's surface.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love classic British mysteries but crave a fiercely intelligent, unapologetically morbid, and utterly charming narrator.
Content notes
- murder
- electrocution
- past death of a child
- family dysfunction
About the book
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'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 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?From the Hardcover edition.
Description from Open Library.
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