The Murder Farm

Starred review from April 21, 2014
Stark as bare branches against a wintry sky, German author Schenkel’s first novel stitches testimony from witnesses and other townsfolk into a suspenseful, immensely sad account of an entire family’s slaughter at Tannöd, their remote farm. Based on an unsolved case in 1922 Bavaria but transported to the mid-’50s, the Danners’ horrific tale unfolds through the voices of neighbors, a classmate of doomed eight-year-old Marianne, and even an itinerant worker planning to rob Tannöd. It quickly becomes clear that this odd, damaged clan—including the ironfisted, lecherous, skinflint of a patriarch and his beaten-down wife, who turns a blind eye to his abuse of their daughter and other girls—is a time bomb waiting to detonate. Compelling as a mystery, the story assumes a larger social dimension with the damning picture it paints of the survivors, smugly convinced of their own rectitude but unwilling to lift a finger even to save a child.

May 1, 2014
In 1922, an entire family was murdered on their farm in Bavaria. This still-unsolved crime is the inspiration for German author Schenkel's 2006 novel Tannod, which is seeing its first U.S. publication now under a new title. Similarities to Capote's In Cold Blood are obvious: a rural setting, a murdered family, a novelistic approach to true events. But this is a much slimmer book than Capote's, and structurally it's quite different. Schenkel uses shifting points of view, first-person reminiscences (many years after the murders) of people who knew the ill-fated Danner family, intertwined with third-person narrative chronicling the events leading up to the crime. What's especially interesting is the author's approach to the subject: if you read between the lines of the statements made by people who knew the Danner familysometimes not between the lines at allyou see that they weren't especially liked in their community. Nobody really wants to talk about them, at least not for very long, and if they don't quite believe the Danners deserved to die, it's clear they don't mind very much that they did. A chilling novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)