While trying to avoid being at the service of her bossy visiting aunt, Flavia wears herself up cycling up and down the village, gathering clues and interviewing witnesses. The heroine is the youngest of three daughters of a widower who is passionate about stamp collecting but not very good at business management. The setting is the sleepy English village of Bishop’s Lacey in 1950. In order to solve one mystery, Flavia must solve the other. To Flavia it is soon clear the rope that killed the boy is somehow tied to the cutting of the puppet-master’s strings. Adding color to his death is the disturbing resemblance between the hero puppet and a local five-year-old boy who accidentally hanged himself five years earlier. This time the victim is a famous puppeteer who, during a performance of Jack and the Beanstalk at the local parish hall, comes crashing down on the stage instead of the expected giant. In this sequel to The Sweetness of the Bottom of the Pie, eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce unites her passion for chemistry (especially poisons), her keen wit, a lot of pedaling of a bicycle named Gladys, and a willingness to use her girlish charms to open doors that are often closed to the police to solve her second murder mystery, only a few weeks after barely surviving her first one.
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