Alan Bradley

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce, #2)

Sarah Sammis

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley is the second of the Flavia de Luce mysteries. Like The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Flavia puts her precocious mind to work to solve the a recent death and an older but mysterious death.

It's 1950 and while television is catching on in London, it's only barely reached the villages. It certainly hasn't reached the de Luce family home, not with a father who insists that he and his daughter spend quality time listening to recordings of classic music. Flavia's description of Beethoven's Fifth is hilarious.

So when a famous chlidren's television puppeteer and his assistant break down near the village cemetery, Flavia doesn't recognize Rupert Porson. Nor does she gush when he explains who he is and what he does. When his assistant cheerfully exclaims that she's Mother Goose, Flavia's dumbstruck.

Flavia continues to be fascinated with death, chemistry and especially poisons. She still has dreams to poison her sisters. Meanwhile they continue to try to convince her that she's adopted. Those, though, who knew the departed Harriet de Luce, tell Flavia that she's the spitting image inside and out of her mother.

I found the book to be an excellent follow up. I plan to continue with the series.

Mounir Bashour

Maggie Gordon

Flavia de Luce is a precocious 11 year old whose pastimes include making poisons and solving mysteries! The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag is the second book in Bradley's series about his child detective, but make no mistake, these are not children's books. Flavia's operate's in an adult's world, though she's still a kid so you get some interesting observations and logic from her. 

In this book, a puppeteer and his assistant roll into town, causing all sorts of trouble. The puppeteer is murdered and Flavia must sort through gossip about the past to make sense of what happened... and solve the murder of a young boy from several years previous while she's at it!

Hangman is definitely a stronger book than Bradley's first in the series. He seems to have settled into the setting and characters more, and the balance between Flavia's brilliance and how much she annoys readers has balanced out. The mystery is also less transparent than the first, and the difficulties of a child's perspective come into play with this one. 

Still an enormously fun series, I find myself quite drawn into Flavia's family and village, and I want to see what happens to all these oddball people in future books.

Yulande Lindsay

A decent mystery almost spoiled by too many asides, unnecessary explanations and ramblings.

Emmett

Another fun romp about Bishop's Lacey with the indomitable and intelligent Flavia de Luce and her trusty bicycle Gladys. I loved how this is marked with a cold touch that the quaint first novel didn't: the death of a young boy, who was found hanging on the gallows in a dark wood, surfaces from the memory of a small town from years ago. This might be a mystery novel but Bradley does wonders with language, painting pictures caricatural one moment and earnestly moving the next. Incredible.

Kim Tyo-Dickerson

Yep, dangerously smart is right. Flavia de Luce remains one of my favorite detective-chemists. Actually, she may be the only detective-chemist I'm reading, but she is still fiercely intelligent and loyal and irrepressible. I love how she handles the incessant bullying of her two horrid older sisters with gentle-yet-uncomfortable poisons in their sweets, or in their lipsticks. And Flavia is only 11 years old. Looking forward to book 4 (I started with book 3, then went back to the first two). I love catching up with her and the mystery right before bed, Bradley's descriptions of the de Luce estate and the surrounding countryside, the eccentric British villagers and the stacks of crusty old newspapers in the local library, all add up to a wonderful fall escape. And I can't read a puppet theatre story without thinking of Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop. Definitely not for or about children.

Nadine 

The series continues as 11yo Flavia uses her wit and knowledge of science to solve criminal mysteries

Sarah Vaughan

Although I didn't love this second book in the series as much as the first, I still give it 5 stars. I find myself loving the setting and characters of these books, and I can't wait to read the others.

Patrick Book

Jackie Cunningham

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Flavia is incisive, cutting and hilarious . . . one of the most remarkable creations in recent literature.”—USA Today Flavia de Luce, a dangerously smart eleven-year-old with a passion for chemistry and a genius for solving murders, thinks that her days of crime-solving in the bucolic English hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey are over—until beloved puppeteer Rupert Porson has his own strings sizzled in an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. But who’d do such a thing, and why? Does the madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood know more than she’s letting on? What about Porson’s charming but erratic assistant? All clues point toward a suspicious death years earlier and a case the local constables can’t solve—without Flavia’s help. But in getting so close to who’s secretly pulling the strings of this dance of death, has our precocious heroine finally gotten in way over her head? BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Alan Bradley's A Red Herring Without Mustard, discussion questions, and an essay by the author.

A Flavia de Luce Novel

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

Martha F.

Gwyn Dill

Pierke Bosschieter

Lisa

Rebecca Harwood

Luca Masters

'I was lying dead in the churchyard...' So says eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce - but soon a murder provides a gruesome distraction from her own death... A travelling puppet show arrives in the sleepy English village of Bishop's Lacey, and everyone gathers to watch a performance of Jack and the Beanstalk in the village hall. But a shadow is cast over proceedings when a shocking murder takes place during the performance - a murder which strangely echoes a tragedy that occurred many years before. For Flavia, undoing the complex knot that ties these strands together will test her precocious powers of deduction to the limit - and throw a revealing light into some of the darker corners of the adult world...

The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag

Nora 

Flavia de Luce applies her skills in the chemistry lab to solving the murder of a master puppeteer, a case that is further complicated by her tormenting sisters.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce, #2)

Reviews