The Hangman's Daughter

The Hangman's Daughter
By Oliver Potzsch (448 pages)
Published by AmazonCrossing
Bookish rating: 3.25

I read this book for two reasons. First, the premise seemed interesting: a series of murders in a small, 17th-century German village lead to accusations of witchcraft. Second, this was a wildly successful translation (from German) that Amazon's international publishing imprint, AmazonCrossing, bought and published. Since much of what Amazon publishes is cheaply (or freely) acquired, I was super interested to gauge the quality of  a bestseller.

Meh. The plot is good enough and the idea of humanizing and going into the head of a hangman is an interesting approach. Potzsch gives a good flavor of the town and its politics, and overall the novel isn't bad. However, the writing is bland and often cliched, which could be partially due to the translation. Hard to say, since I didn't read the original German version. Plus, you know, I can't read German. An excessive! use! of! exclamation! points! often makes the novel seem overdone, with a Batman-like (wham! bang!) cheese factor, especially with dialogue.

Some scenes are genuinely scary, such as when the so-called "devil" sneaks into a sick child's room to kill her (she escapes), and the "witch" torture scenes are blessedly not needlessly gratuitous--torture for the sake of drama and gore instead of plot movement is one of my pet peeves. Potzsch balances this very well, considering the village hangman (who's in charge of getting confessions via torture) is the main character and accusations of witchcraft abound.

In short, the novel is okay. Not bad, not great. I doubt I'll read the sequel.