Book description
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. Inbetween, 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.
