The Murder Farm

The Murder Farm

by Anthea Bell (Translator), Andrea Maria Schenkel (Author), Anthea Bell (Translator), Andrea Maria Schenkel (Author)

Synopsis

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.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 192
Publisher: riverrun
Published: 05 Jun 2008

ISBN 10: 1847243665
ISBN 13: 9781847243669
Prizes: Winner of Deutscher Krimi Preis: National 2007 and CORINE International Book Award: Weltbild Readers' Award 2007 and Friedrich Glauser Prize: Debut Novel 2007.

Media Reviews
This 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 Review * Literary Review *
Already 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 Sunday * Scotland on Sunday *
...remarkable, sparse, chilling novel...the literary equivalent of The Blair Witch Project...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 Times * The Times *
With 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 . that this has been packed into such a short novel is a considerable achievement - The Times Literary Supplement * Times Literary Supplement *
Author Bio
Andrea Maria Schenkel lives with her family near Regensburg, in Bavaria, Germany. On publication in Germany, Tannod won first place in the German Crime Prize as well as the Friedrich-Glauser Prize.