THE WEED THAT STRINGS THE HANGMAN’S BAG

Almost 11 and keen on poisons, Flavia de Luce gets a second chance to broaden her lethal knowledge.

Roused from a detailed fantasy of her own funeral by a nosy jackdaw and the sound of a woman weeping, Flavia encounters Mother Goose—or so the pretty redhead introduces herself. Actually Nialla only plays the role in Rupert Porson’s puppet show, currently bogged down with van trouble. The vicar of Bishop’s Lacey suggests a mechanic and puts the puppeteer and his assistant up with the Inglebys at Culverhouse Farm. Rupert will repay the help by staging his production of “Jack and the Beanstalk” at St. Tancred’s parish hall. Oddly, although Rupert claims never to have met the Inglebys before, his Jack puppet bears the face of their son Robin, deceased five years ago in what a 1945 inquest termed misadventure. Inspector Hewitt, whose first acquaintance with Flavia (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, 2009) solved a murder, must wait patiently once more while Flavia chats up the neighbors, breaks into the library, researches the past, washes down scones, horehound candies and cucumber sandwiches with tea, and sabotages a box of chocolates meant for one of her tormenting sisters.

A gloriously eccentric cast of characters, from Flavia’s dad, whose stamp collection is bankrupting the ancestral digs, to her sisters Ophelia and Daphne, who tell Flavia she was a foundling. There’s not a reader alive who wouldn’t want to watch Flavia in her lab concocting some nefarious brew.