German author Andrea Maria Schenkel hit the ground running with her 2006 debut, Tannöd, based on the still-unsolved pickaxe murder of an extended family of six in a Bavarian farming community in 1922. Schenkel’s fictional account is set during the 1950s and won Germany’s prestigious Deutsche Krimi-Preis, as well as Sweden’s Martin Beck Award. The novel was translated into English as The Murder Farm, and was dubbed a “remarkable, sparse, chilling novel…the literary equivalent of The Blair Witch Project,” by the Times Literary Supplement.
Schenkel’s second novel, Kalteis, is set in Munich during the 1930s and features the hunt for a serial killer. This novel was also awarded the Deutsche Krimi-Preis, making Schenkle the first writer to ever win the prize two years consecutively. Translated into English as Ice Cold, Schenkel’s work once again earned critical acclaim, The Times Literary Supplement declared, ” With only a limited number of ways in which violent death can be investigated, crime writers have to use considerable ingenuity to bring anything fresh to the genre. Andrea Maria Schenkel has done it.” (more…)
Scene of the Crime 