THE WEED THAT STRINGS THE HANGMAN'S BAG

THE WEED THAT STRINGS THE HANGMAN'S BAG by Alan Bradley

From Amazon.com:

Flavia de Luce, a dangerously smart eleven-year-old with a passion for chemistry and agenius 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?

This is the second book in this cute series.  Flavia again manages to figure out whodunnit, and teaches the local police department a thing or two.  Flavia has a penchant for producing poisons, and different chemical experiments are outlined in the book.  Not being a chemistry professor, I have no idea if these would actually work.  I hope not!

I have the third book - A RED HERRING WITHOUT MUSTARD - ready to go.