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The hangman's daughter
512 pages
A dread-soaked historical thriller where reason races against mounting paranoia in a shadowy seventeenth-century Bavarian town.
What it feels like
This atmospheric historical thriller plunges readers into the dread-soaked streets of a seventeenth-century Bavarian town haunted by the dark legacy of witch trials. The pace is brisk and urgent, driven by a suspenseful race against time as mounting hysteria threatens to tear a community apart. The mood is distinctly paranoid and shadowy, capturing the terrifying friction between lingering superstition and emerging reason. The prose grounds the reader in a grim, tactile reality where the threat of torture and execution looms over every page. It is a perfect fit for readers who crave dark, suspenseful historical fiction that explores the terrifying consequences of mass panic and the heavy burden of a bloody past.
- Mood
- dread-soaked
- paranoid
- shadowy
- tense
- Tone
- suspenseful
- grim
- urgent
- atmospheric
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- mass hysteria · superstition versus reason · the weight of history · community paranoia
- The writing
- Atmospheric and suspenseful, grounding the reader in the grim, shadowy reality of a seventeenth-century Bavarian town.
- The arc
- Moves from a chilling discovery into mounting dread and frantic urgency as a community succumbs to paranoia.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love dark, suspenseful historical fiction where reason battles superstition in a paranoid, witch-fearing society.
Content notes
- child death
- torture
- execution
- witch trials
- mass hysteria
About the book
Germany, 1659: When a dying boy is pulled from the river with a mark crudely tattooed on his shoulder, hangman Jakob Kuisl is called upon to investigate whether witchcraft is at play in his small Bavarian town. Whispers and dark memories of witch trials and the women burned at stake just seventy years earlier still haunt the streets of Schongau. When more children disappear and an orphan boy is found dead, marked by the same tattoo, the mounting hysteria threatens to erupt into chaos. Before the unrest forces him to torture and execute the very woman who aided in the birth of his children, Jakob must unravel the truth. With the help of his clever daughter, Magdelena, and Simon, the university-educated son of the town's physician, Jakob discovers that a devil is indeed loose in Schongau. But it may be too late to prevent bloodshed.
Description from Open Library.
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