The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

Author: Alan Bradley
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Year: 2010

This is the second of Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce mystery novels. For those who know nothing of little Flavia, she is an eleven year girl living in the 1950s English countryside. Flavia is obsessed with poisons and various ways to kill people with poisons. Yet, she manages to find herself in the midst of solving murders with both books. 

In The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, a traveling puppeteer comes to Bishops Lacey and ends up dead and, of course, Flavia is right in the middle of the mystery. Flavia's biggest problem ends up being the sheer number of people who had reason to want the puppeteer dead.

I love these books. They're great little mysteries (cozy mysteries). They're humorous, Flavia is enchanting and the stories are well written. Some people might worry that they'd have a hard time believing an eleven year old could solve murders but Flavia is believable. She's like a younger version of Nancy Drew. If you're a plain old mystery reader, you need to be reading these books.