For eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an audience with a gypsy fortune-teller at the Bishop's Lacey village fete is just a bit of fun. Until the old woman sees (or claims to see) a vision of Flavia's mother, Harriet, who died on a mountain side in Tibet when Flavia was a baby. 'She is trying to come home,' the old woman intones, chilling them both. With only her faithful bicycle, Gladys, and her precocious powers of deduction to help her, Flavia starts down a dark and twisting road to the truth.