Snow White Must Die

Starred review from November 5, 2012
German author Neuhaus makes her U.S. debut with this impressive multidimensional police procedural, which has already been published in 15 countries with more than three million copies in print. Convicted on circumstantial evidence of murdering two vanished 17-year-old girls, 30-year-old Tobias Sartorius returns home to Altenhain, a village near Frankfurt, after serving his 10-year sentence, to find his parents divorced and their lives as hopeless as his has become. The townspeople maintain a mafia-like code of silence to protect terrible betrayals past and present, even as the discovery of the skeletal remains of one of the missing girls leads Det. Insp. Pia Kirchhoff and Det. Sgt. Oliver von Bodenstein to suspect Tobias was innocent. Meanwhile, the two police officers get caught up in personal crises that realistically counterpoint the violence that greets Tobias's attempts to re-establish his life, when yet another girl goes missing and masked villagers nearly kill him. Again and again, Neuhaus inserts the old Grimm fairy tale refrainâ"White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony"âthat describes Snow White, the role of one of the original missing girls in a high school play10 years earlier, to underscore the grimmest of human emotions: white for icily plotted revenge, red for raging jealousy, black for homicidal madness.

November 15, 2012
It takes a village to concoct an alibi. Now that Tobias Sartorius has come home to Altenhain after 10 years in the German prison system for the murders of Stefanie, who threw him over, and her pal Laura, his former girlfriend, much has changed. His parents have divorced, the family cafe has gone out of business and the family home is in such disrepair that no self-respecting rat would live in it. What remains is the enmity of those who will never forgive him for what he did to those teenage girls, whose bodies have never been found. Tobi is shunned, then beaten with bats. And he still has no memory of what he's done--probably because, as police detectives Oliver von Bodenstein, going through a rocky patch in his marriage, and Pia Kirchhoff, fighting off the legal demolition of her farm, come to realize, he may not have actually done anything. The only villager who believes in him is newcomer Amelie, waitress at the Black Horse, who eavesdrops on conversations that hint at who may have just pushed Tobi's mother off an overpass, who ambushed him and why they seem to be overly beholden to local nabob Terlinden, whose favors always have a catch. Terlinden's son Lars used to be Tobi's best friend. His twin, Thies, an autistic mute, now seems enamored of Amelie and shares his secret paintings with her. Do they implicate the cultural minister in past crimes? Or Tobi's old pals, including former tomboy Nadia, now a gorgeous cinema star? While Oliver's marriage crumbles and Pia scrambles to cover his lapses on the job, Amelie disappears, then Thies, and all the village secrets must be uncovered before the innocent can be redeemed. This emotional page turner, fueled by unexpected plot twists, marks the American debut of Germany's best-selling suspense writer, whose targets include the bourgeois, the overly solicitous and the rationalizations that lead to tragedy.

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December 1, 2012
A 30-year-old man returns to his small German hometown of Altenhain after a decade in prison for the murders of two young women. He finds his father a broken man and his mother living elsewhere under a new name. When she is attacked and thrown from a bridge onto a busy highway, police inspectors Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are drawn to seemingly quiet Altenhain, where the stolid burghers are actually hiding a roiling cauldron of secrets, enmities, scandals, infidelities, red-hot rages, and cold-blooded attacks. Snow White Must Die is the first U.S. publication for this best-selling German author, and she energetically piles up plot turns and revelations that have readers beliving that nearly every character is millimeters from emotional meltdown or violent rampage. Even the handsome, urbane von Bodenstein, the son of a countess, is nearly paralyzed by his wife's apparent infidelity. For U.S. crime fans, the resurrection of the eighteenth-century notion of Sturm und Drang might seem a bit over the top, but the novel is still great, guilty fun.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)