The Murder Farm

Description

A whole family has been murdered with a pickaxe. They were old Danner the farmer, an overbearing patriarch; his put-upon devoutly religious wife; and their daughter Barbara Spangler, whose husband Vincenz left her after fathering her daughter little Marianne. She also had a son, two-year-old Josef, apparently the result of her affair with local farmer Georg Hauer after his wife's death from cancer. Hauer himself claimed paternity. Also murdered was the Danners' new maidservant, Marie, who was regarded as slightly simple. "The Murder Farm" is an unconventional detective story. The author interweaves testament from the villagers, an oblique view of the murderer, occasional third-person narrative pieces and passages of pious devotion. Officially the crime is unsolved, the narrator leaves the village unaware of the truth, only the reader is able to reach the shattering conclusion.

Awards

Winner of Deutscher Krimi Preis: National 2007 and Friedrich Glauser Prize: Debut Novel 2007 and CORINE International Book Award: Weltbild Readers' Award 2007.

Reviews

...remarkable, sparse, chilling novel A... the literary equivalent of The Blair Witch Project A... it is hard to read this book without coming under the sinister shadow of an Austrian family incarcerated in the cellar for half a lifetime - The TimesAlready an international bestseller, this superior German crime novel explores the murder of an entire family. The novel is a collage of various voices and testaments with no 'drawing-room' expose at the end - the reader has to solve the case - Scotland on SundayThis is a pitiless portrait of inward-looking, bigoted peasants, beautifully written and equally well-translated. The book is gripping, and, incidentally, has broken sales records in Germany - Literary ReviewWith only a limited number of ways in which violent death can be investigated, crime writers have to use considerable ingenuity to bring anything fresh to the genre. Andrea Maria Schenkel has done it in her first novel, The Murder Farm A... that this has been packed into such a short novel is a considerable achievement - The Times Literary Supplement