It all began with that awful business about my mother... Flavia de Luce's world is turned upside down when she is banished to Miss Bodycote's Female Academy in Canada - her mother Harriet's old boarding school. With its forbidding headmistress, intimidating teachers and bizarre rules, adapting to Miss Bodycote's could be a matter of life and death.

But Flavia is soon on familiar ground when she is presented with a gruesome puzzle to solve. And the mystery of a withered corpse is only the beginning. Girls have been disappearing from Miss Bodycote's, leading Flavia to wonder what exactly the academy's true purpose is, and why were her father and Aunt Felicity so keen that she enrol?