The Murder Farm

About this book

The Times Literary Supplement said of The Murder Farm 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 first author to achieve a consecutive win of the German Crime Prize Schenkel has won first place for both The Murder Farm and Ice Cold. The Murder Farm begins with a shock: 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 the result of her affair with local farmer Georg Hauer after his wifes death from cancer. Hauer himself claimed paternity. Also murdered was the Danners maidservant Marie. An unconventional detective story The Murder Farm is an exciting blend of eyewitness account third-person narrative pious diatribes and incomplete case file that will keep readers guessing. When we leave the narrator not even he knows the truth and only the reader is able to reach the shattering conclusion.