By Brooke King, Staff Writer
The year is 1659 and the Thirty Years’ War has just ended. There had not been a shred of witchcraft pandemonium in several decades, but all the years of peaceful silence come crashing to a bitter halt when a young boy is found gruesomely murdered and pulled from the river covered in the markings of witches.
The local midwife, Martha Stechlin, is suspected of the crime and the villagers have tasked Jakob Kuisl, a Bavarian hangman, to extract the confession from her by torturing her until he gets one. Magdalena is the smart and stubborn daughter of Jakob Kuisl. She and her father live outside the confines of the village and Magdalena is set to be married to another hangman’s son, although the town physician’s son is madly in love with her. Yet, for all of her father’s infinite love for Magdalena, his words of wisdom match his eccentric profession, dark and dismal.
Assured of her innocence, Magdalena and her swooning would-be suitor (the physician’s son) fight against time to find the real killer and bring them to justice, but when the another child is found branded with the witch’s mark, the town becomes frenzied. Tales begin to spiral out of control about the spotting of the devil in the woods with hands of bones with no flesh about them. Jakob, Magdalena, and the physician’s son now go face to face with real evil.
Going back to the day when coffee was a rarity and autopsies were considered the work of the devil, and the devil was the only enemy, The Hangman’s Daughter captures the essence of the seventeenth-century Bavaria. While the subject matter is quite dark, the plot is not overly gruesome, leaving just enough detail for the reader’s own imagination. The intriguing mystery surrounding the plot captivates and catapults the reader into the story, connecting the reader with the characters and the time period.
The author, Oliver Pötzsch (a descendent of one of Bavaria’s leading dynasties of executioners), has a personal historical connection to the subject matter, which only adds to the authenticity of the details. The story itself weaves a tale of a sympathetic and kindhearted hangman that captures the imagination of the reader and lives on as the archetypal father figure well after the book has been out away on the shelf.
