Tobias Sartorius spent a decade in solitary confinement in a
German prison, convicted at seventeen for murdering two seventeen-year-old
classmates in his home town, the village of Altenhain near Frankfurt. Unlike
most convicted murderers, Tobi never claimed innocence: he didn't know if he was the killer, since he'd been
in a drunken stupor. He was awakened by the police investigating the simultaneous
disappearances of Laura and Stefanie - the first his ex-girlfriend, the second
his current sweetie. Without bodies, the case was entirely circumstantial, but
there was plenty of evidence and enough witnesses to send the manchild away for a
decade.
Now pushing thirty and facing the life of an ex-con, Sartorius
returns to his Altenhain to find his parents divorced, the family farm and restaurant in receivership, and his former friends and neighbors
violently opposed to his presence. That violence begins as graffiti, but quickly progresses to beatings. Local police detectives Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein first meet Sartorius père et fils when they arrive to inform Hartmut Sartorius that his ex-wife
had been brutally assaulted on the night of his son's release. Apparently,
when disaster strikes in Altenhain, it strikes with a vengeance.
Then a newcomer to the village also disappears. It's yet another comely seventeen-year-old lass, Amelie, who not only lives in Stefanie's old house but bears a striking resemblance to the young girl the village had nicknamed "Snow White." Almost at the same time, a crew working on an abandoned airfield not far
away finds a body in an old fuel tank: Laura Wagner's mortal remains. And one
of the twin sons of the rich villager who could best be described as the
"lord of the manor" commits suicide. And the other twin son escapes
from the local mental hospital. And the husband of the local doctor, a mid-level
politician with higher aspirations, finds sinister notes in his mail and email
saying, "I know what you did..." Yep, it's Snow White Must Die.
An "international best-seller" first published in
2010 by German author Nele Neuhaus, Schneewittchen
Muss Sterben was translated to the English-language Snow White Must Die by
Stephen T. Murray. As far as I can tell, Murray did fairly well, though it's
tough to determine whether some of the more clumsy passages are due to translation
or are faithful to Neuhaus's original. Suffice it to say that clumsiness is
rare but not entirely absent.
Though nominally a mystery novel in the category of police
procedural, the book bears little resemblance to current crime fiction in the subgenre such as that of Michael Connelly (the Harry Bosch series) or John Sandford (Virgil Flowers). The action seems far more
influenced by shennanigans reminiscent of 1980s nighttime soaps like
"Dallas" and "Dynasty," or life along Wisteria Lane with its "Desperate Housewives." Liars, cheaters, manipulators, murderers,
devious doctors, adulterers, killers, sociopaths, you name it: the one little village has it all.
While the protagonists are cops, Kirchhoff and von
Bodenstein spend more time obsessing over personal problems (a building
permit fiasco and marital infidelity, respectively) and office politics than on police work. Von Bodenstein has not one but two auto accidents in
the same book, and - once he's caught his wife in the act - quickly hops in the sack with a co-worker (though not Kirchhoff) and at the end of the book is off
for a "date" with a minor character; mere days after his marriage
began to disintegrate. Such realism...
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Premise-wise, Snow White
Must Die frankly makes little sense. The concept of the original crime -
two seventeen-year-old girls disappearing from the same little village on the same day - strains credulity; but it's nothing compared to the "real"
story of the two girls' deaths. What's perhaps least likable about this novel
is the manner in which Neuhaus piles disaster on disaster to pad out a thin plot, then piles
revelation on revelation to create her denouement. One can somewhat accept a
cover-up engineered by the local feudal lord to protect his guilty son, but the
revelation that his cover-up is overshadowed by another that's older and even more insidious? Without the slightest work done to support the revelation? Feh.
With people jumping in the sack with almost anything that
moves (though there is nothing graphic) and a stable of villains overflowing with
avarice and self-absorption, Snow White
Must Die feels very much like a novel for the 21st century. More's the
pity, if this century deserves so little.
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