The Hangman's Daughter

About this book

New York Times and USA Today Bestseller The Hangmans Daughter is now available as a hardcover Collectors edition with illustrations by Ben Gibson. Magdalena the clever and headstrong daughter of Bavarian hangman Jakob Kuisl lives with her father outside the village walls and is destined to be married off to another hangmans sonexcept that the town physicians son is hopelessly in love with her. And her fathers wisdom and empathy are as unusual as his despised profession. It is 1659 the Thirty Years War has finally ended and there hasnt been a witchcraft mania in decades. But now a drowning and gruesomely injured boy tattooed with the mark of a witch is pulled from a river and the villagers suspect the local midwife Martha Stechlin. Jakob Kuisl is charged with extracting a confession from her and torturing her until he gets one. Convinced she is innocent he Magdalena and her would-be suitor to race against the clock to find the true killer. Approaching Walpurgisnacht when witches are believed to dance in the forest and mate with the devil another tattooed orphan is found dead and the town becomes frenzied. More than one person has spotted what looks like the devila man with a hand made only of bones. The hangman his daughter and the doctors son face a terrifying and very real enemy. Taking us back in history to a place where autopsies were blasphemous coffee was an exotic drink dried toads were the recommended remedy for the plague and the devil was as real as anything The Hangmans Daughter brings to cinematic life the sights sounds and smells of seventeenth-century Bavaria telling the engrossing story of a compassionate hangman who will live on in readers imaginations long after theyve put down the novel.