In an old, lonely and remote farmhouse in the midst of the Tuscany, a mushroom collector finds a horribly mutilated body: Sarah, the German wife of restaurant owner Romano, throat has been cut through. This brutal killing is only the beginning of the doom that began years ago in Germany, and now reaching into the future to take it's hold over a whole family until it reaches a final, most gruesome ending.
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Romano Simonetti worked in an Italian restaurant in Germany when the battered and abused Sarah stood in his doorway, holding a crying infant in her arms. A friendship developed soon and they fled to Italy to open Romano's dream: a small restaurant.
They marry, they become children but you can not hide from your past.
Sarah's passion for other men, a mentally disabled son, an intelligent daughter with jealousy issues, a mean mother in law, and the daughters father are a mean mixture made to explode sooner or later.
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The book begins with the discovery of Sarah's dead body by one of her former affairs and her husband learning that his wife has been killed. From there on we learn about Sarah and her family through flashbacks placed very nicely. Actually the whole book is more flashbacks than "real time". The reader learns how the family developed and how the disaster was built brick by brick by the victim.
Whatever it was I felt like a bystander watching a families doom slowly develop in front of my eyes. I saw through Sarah's and Romano's eyes. I saw through the eyes of daughter Elsa and those of the abusive ex-boyfriend from Germany.
All in all you won't get a real thriller, nor will you get a family saga. There will be things you will be able to predict, but there will also be things that surprise you.
I for myself couldn't put the book down and loved it from the beginning to the end.
Sabine Thiesler is a German author, who's novels unfortunately haven't been translated yet. Her first novel, Der Kindersammler was a major success. Hexenkind, different but unique in it's own can add to that. Her third novel Die Totengraeberin was published in the beginning of 2009 and I won't wait much longer to pick it up.
Let's hope at some point they are going to translate the books. It really would add to the international list of very good writers.
Rating:
Paperback: 580 pages
Publisher: Heyne Paperback (October 1, 2007)
Language: German
ISBN-10: 3453432746
ISBN-13: 978-3453432741
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