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 Bishops Lacey are over--until beloved puppeteer Rupert Porson has his own strings sizzled in an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. But whod do such a thing, and why? Does the madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood know more than shes letting on? What about Porsons charming but erratic assistant? All clues point toward a suspicious death years earlier and a case the local constables cant solve--without Flavias help. But in getting so close to whos secretly pulling the strings of this dance of death, has our precocious heroine finally gotten in way over her head?