The Weed That Strings The Hangman's Bag.

ALAN BRADLEY

Publication: Orion Books, 2010, London

First U. K. edition. Signed by the author on a publisher's label and laid-in. The author's scheduled trip to England was cancelled due to the recent volcano outburst in Iceland and the resultant ash cancelled hundreds of flights throughout Europe. Therefore his signing trip was cancelled and publisher's labels were provided. Fine in fine dust jacket. 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. In between a haunting tale that involves Punch & Judy, 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 centering 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.

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