30 January 2013

Snow White Must Die? Kill the Bitch Already!


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...

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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