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 - and then 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?