The weed that strings the hangman's bag

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, Alan Bradley weaves a hauntingly nightmarish tale that involves Punch & Judy - and in particular Mr Punch's nemesis, 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 centring 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.