The Hangman Returns in The Dark Monk

When I first bought my Kindle, I spent months reading free classics. And then, I finally made my first ebook purchase: The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Potzsch.

The Hangman’s Daughter series takes place in an old Bavarian town named Augsburg where the hangman Jakob Kuisl and his daughter Magdelana live. The first book was all about the father-daughter team exonerating the town’s midwife. This is medieval Bavaria where the town demands to see violent torturing of their criminals — especially a midwife that has been named responsible for witchcraft and the killing of innocent babies.

The Hangman’s Daughter was an absolute page-turner. Kuisl’s wise antics and his daughter’s stubbornness makes them very memorable characters. Potzsch also has a knack for creating the atmosphere of Augsburg whether it’s the warm Kuisl living room or mass hysteria throughout the town.

The Dark Monk is the second book in the series and it continues with the same great characters and setting. The story begins with one of the Ausberg priests being murdered in a tomb behind his church. Kuisl soon learns that the tomb houses secrets of the treasures from The Knight’s Templar.

I wasn’t really a fan of the religious overtones in the second book. There was too much running around and I found it hard to keep track of where all the characters were. But it was still a page-turner and there’s plenty of foreshadowing of what’s to come in book three, The Beggar King.

Photo credits: loveage-moondream.tumblr.com, pinterest.com

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Waiting on Wednesday: Snow White Must Die

This is my eighth edition of Waiting on Wednesday, a weekly event held by Breaking the Spine.

I began university thinking that I’d be an English major but half way through my final modern literature exam, I realized I was sick of it. I didn’t want to analyze T.S. Eliot to death, I just wanted to read it, love it and fall asleep dreaming of fictitious worlds.

So I chose to major in Criminology instead. I read about morbid Victorian court cases about cannibalism on the high seas and the horrible conditions of state asylums. And I came to appreciate murder mystery fiction in a whole new light.

Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus sounds like a fantastic creepy thriller. Neuhaus is widely known German author but this is her first book translated to English. From what I understand, this is the first book in a series which has already done incredibly well in Germany.

Snow White Must Die is available January 15th, 2013.

Synopsis:

On a rainy November day police detectives Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are summoned to a mysterious traffic accident: A woman has fallen from a pedestrian bridge onto a car driving underneath. According to a witness, the woman may have been pushed. The investigation leads Pia and Oliver to a small village, and the home of the victim, Rita Cramer.

On a September evening eleven years earlier, two seventeen-year-old girls vanished from the village without a trace. In a trial based only on circumstantial evidence, twenty-year-old Tobias Sartorius, Rita Cramer’s son, was sentenced to ten years in prison. Bodenstein and Kirchhoff discover that Tobias, after serving his sentence, has now returned to his home town. Did the attack on his mother have something to do with his return?

In the village, Pia and Oliver encounter a wall of silence. When another young girl disappears, the events of the past seem to be repeating themselves in a disastrous manner. The investigation turns into a race against time, because for the villagers it is soon clear who the perpetrator is—and this time they are determined to take matters into their own hands.

Painting by Liese Chavez. Print available from Etsy.

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Beauty is fleeting in Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque

Appropriately, I finished reading Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque on a dark and rainy night. Kirino is a Japanese writer whose novels are part crime mysteries, part feminist social commentary. Known for writing about the criminal under belly of Japan (which is arguably more visible than in other parts of the world), Kirino convincingly takes you into the minds of the characters who are trapped on the bottom rungs of society.

Grotesque is the story of two prostitutes and how they came to be killed by the same man. One woman, Yuriko, is a self-described nymphomaniac whose beauty renders men speechless and turns women into jealous monsters. The other, Kazue, is a severe and studious woman who is employed at a well-known architecture firm. Both women attended the prestigious Q High School for Young Women as teens but they couldn’t be more different. The story is told from several perspectives: Yuriko’s sister gets a turn, as does the two murdered women and so does the alleged murderer.

Without giving too much away, it’s fair to say that none of the narratives are completely reliable. They all have too much to hide. But Kirino’s writing is as beautiful as this story is horrible and so the reader silently listens to all the lies. In this world and often in our world, women are constantly judged by their appearances and whole families are permanently sidelined due to social standing. Even the beautiful Yuriko can’t escape the social pressures when she grows old and has to sell herself at the lowest price.

Grotesque is not a book for the weak. It touches on some very taboo topics such as incest, male prostitution and sex with minors. There were parts of the novel that had me cringing but it’s not without reason. Kirino is trying to make a statement as hard as it is to hear it.

Every time I wanted to close the book and pretend none of these issues were real, I kept going back because I so fascinated by the characters. I wanted to know how they ended up dead. Grotesque lives up to its title by being that train wreck that you just can’t turn away from.

Photo credits: data.whicdn.com

Waiting on Wednesday: The Dark Monk

This is my third edition of Waiting on Wednesday, a weekly event held by Breaking the Spine.

Sometime last year, I read Oliver Potzsch’s The Hangman’s Daughter and loved it! It was the top seller on Kindle at the time. So I’m delighted to hear that the sequel, titled The Dark Monk, has been translated by Amazon and will be released on June 12, 2012.

The Hangman’s Daughter is based around a Bavarian village executioner Jacob Kuisl and his daughter, Magdelena during medieval times. What really adds depth to the story is that author himself is a descendent of the Kuisl clan, a long line of executioners. In The Hangman’s Daughter, Jacob and Magdelena try to prove that the village midwife is innocent after she’s been accused of practicing witchcraft and murder.

There’s nothing quite like a village mob to get your heart racing! Being such a big fan of The Hangman’s Daughter means that I have big expectations for The Dark Monk. If dissapointed, I will likely go medieval and burn my Kindle at the stake.

Photo credits: dirtylittlestylewhoree.tumblr.com, blackeiffel.blogspot.com