Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I happened upon Oliver Potzsch's The Hangman's Daughter one day when I opened up my Kindle to find Amazon pushing it on the splash screen. Hoping for something closer to Iain Pear's Stones Fall, but with fresh memories of Orhan Pamuk's abominable My Name is Red, I waded once again into a historical mystery. The devil is afoot in the Bavarian town of Schongau in 1659. Orphans are being murdered and the superstitious burghers of the town have accused a local midwife of witchcraft and complicity in the murders. The law dictates, however, that the accused must confess before she can be burned at the stake. Enter Jakob Kuisl, the town's executioner and torturer. The town council wants Kuisl to extract a confession from the midwife. Kuisl is not only the town's headsman, he's also an amateur apothecary, medical practitioner and detective. He believes the midwife is innocent and tries to stall for time while searching for the true killer. The premise is intriguing and it's what drew me to the book. The start was promising, but The Hangman's Daughter soon became bogged down by very bad writing and a poor, improbable plot. The prose is hackneyed, banal and clumsy, if not awkward. The banter is thick with that kind of cheesy bravado one finds in badly dubbed martial arts movies of the 70's. Grown men, supposedly tough hombres, call each other "rascals", "brats" and (one cringes at the memory) "little know it all"'s. It seems that the entire novel is filled with dialog along the lines of "I know you are but what am I?". Life and death played out on an elementary school playground. Much of the criticism leveled at this book for the anachronistic writing is spot on. I love well written historical fiction because it takes me to a place I've never been and holds me there. When, as in The Hangman's Daughter, one character asks another "Are you nuts?" or another explains to his partner that they can't search a field because "This area is under surveillance.", the reader is jolted out of what the author would like you to think is 17th century Bavaria. The plot is a sieve. Potzsch habitually writes a paragraph and then directly contradicts himself in the next. For example, we learn that the body of a highwayman has been prominently left hanging on the gallows tree to serve as an example for those passing by on their way to Schongau. In the very next paragraph the author tells us that a band of criminals has chosen the area around the gallows tree as a hideout because no one ever ventures there. At one point the hangman is able to beat some important information out of one of the criminal ringleaders because, he says, "In the end, they all talk." Unfortunately during the interrogation, the hangman forgot to ask his victim the most important question: who paid to have the murders done. I haven't read many mysteries, but in those I have, the guilty party is usually forced into confessing because they've been outsmarted into doing so or there is some threat to their physical well being. At the climax of the novel, the perpetrator does indeed reveal himself. With absolutely no reason to do so, he blurts out a full confession to a man who has no credibility, influence in town and no power to coerce such a confession.The man, a doctor, simply walked into the house of the guilty man and said something like "I know you're guilty" and the criminal started singing. As if the plot and writing weren't bad enough, the characters were either one dimensional or not very likeable. One theme which runs through the book is the ignorance and superstition of people living in this time and place. It seems that characters are fall into one of two groups. Most are superstitious knuckle draggers who see the devil behind every tree and want to burn as a witch any woman who exhibits suspicious behavior, like laughing. Then there are the hangman, his daughter Magdalena and the aforementioned doctor, Simon. These three enlightened beings are ahead of their time and they know it. They spend much of the time smirking (or "grinning", a word Potzsch likes) at the ignorance of their neighbors. Such condescension makes them thoroughly unlikeable. I wondered, as the hangman laid back in the grass for the umpteenth time to smoke his pipe and grin at the great unwashed going about their business in complete ignorance, how the hell it took this legend in his own mind more than 400 pages to catch the perps. Although I obviously can't say for sure, my feeling is that back in that day, anyone open-minded enough to swim against the tide of backwardness of those times did so, out of necessity, with a bit of caution and humility. Read to the end of the story and prepare for yet more frustration. Oliver Potzsch writes a postscript in which he goes into some detail about the history of his family (a historical clan of executioners) and 17th century German history. The postscript is really well written. I really had trouble understanding how the man who wrote about his family in that last chapter was responsible for the mess that was The Hangman's Daughter. Perhaps Oliver should stick to nonfiction.