The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Potzsch

I wish I could hate this book. I really wish it had something to it that I could sink my teeth into, whether a stupid plot or irritating characters or a general disrespect for the reader's intelligence. At least then it would have been interesting. As it is I found this book so innocuous, so bereft of anything truly attention grabbing, that it is too boring to even be an annoyance.
Oh, sure, there's the dead kids with the witch's mark on their backs but the mark only serves to stir up witch anxiety among the villagers and the killings all happen in the first 1/4 of the book. Other stuff happens but nothing on par with child murder, leaving the book feeling a little top heavy.

The marks are only in the plot to get the local midwife accused of witchcraft so that we have someone to worry about during the story. Only the midwife doesn't exist outside of the role of "innocent victim who needs to be exonerated". I mean, I don't want to see her tortured and killed, but I never want to see anyone tortured and killed. I don't really have any feelings for her otherwise.

The characters on the whole are pretty stereotypical and flat. The young doctor is enlightened and prissy, the titular daughter is feisty and intelligent, and her father is phlegmatic and practical. He's the only character I really had any interest in and he still had little in the way of an inner life. The villain has the looks and sartorial sense of a Disney antagonist and the townspeople are petty and stupid.

The hangman wants to find the real killer so he doesn't have to torture the midwife but all he seems to do is smoke and drink and then he ends up torturing her anyway. The mystery itself is straight out of an episode of Scooby-doo. This book had the potential to be way more interesting but it seemed to keep retreating into safe blandness.

I bought liquorice altoids today.

I have no idea who this man is but my grandmother must have known and liked him well enough to keep photos of him for sixty plus years.

Okay, now I want to talk about The Redbreast seriously because it consumed me for a week and I need to get it off my chest.

It's not a bad book. It's a perfectly decent thriller with lots of interconnecting parts and interesting history. I learned a side of WWII that I didn't know about. We didn't learn much about Norway's role in the war in school beyond the fact that it was occupied and the government and royal family fled to England. The whole background about the resistance movement and those who fought for the Germans and the trials and executions afterwards was fascinating. The book has this going for it. It should could have been a lot shorter but I acknowledge my lack of an attention span may play into that particular complaint, on this and other works of fiction. The characters are poorly developed and there isn't much in the way of setting description. That's probably my own preferences coming into play.

However.

The main character's leaps of logic and intuition are informed by authorial omniscience and the foreshadowing is as subtle as a brick. Characters who are supposed to be smart turn as dumb as a box of rocks so the author doesn't have to try very hard to bring certain events around. The Prince, a man who supplies guns to neo-nazis and is supposed to be competent and capable, uses the same phone for orders as he does for his girlfriends. And he leaves it turned on, sitting around. This is basic. If you're involved in illegal activities keep it separate from your personal life. The character that discovers what he's up to, after acknowledging that her life is in danger, leaves the safety of her home to walk to her boyfriend's apartment, picking up cigarettes along the way and then takes a deserted shortcut. This is dumb. To go for that extra cliche, she calls the main character before taking her leisurely stroll only to get his answering machine and instead of saying what she found, only leaves a cryptic message to the effect that she found something important.

While a lot made me roll my eyes there was one thing that greatly bothered me. Every woman in the book that had any impact on the story became a victim. Two were blackmailed into sex and the other two were murdered. This would be less disturbing if there was at least one female character that related to the plot in some way that was not reduced to victim status.

As I said, the book is interesting and I would read more of this author's work if his books weren't all around 500 pages long.

Now I'm reading Night Train by Martin Amis because...I'm not sure. He's supposed to be a good author and I wanted a quick read so I chose the shortest book by him on the shelf. Well, it's apparently his attempt at an American detective story with a modernist twist. I read the first paragraph (which reads like something aimed at 12 year olds) and decided to read the rest as though it's comedy. And it is funny. His American, female cop voice is horrible. The narrative is first person and it's so bad that it is hard to believe this wasn't written as a parody. His main character is the stereotypical American as imagined by a European who's only source of information is bad cop shows. There is moronic philosophical inner monologues on the nature of crime and gender roles, misuse of Yiddish words, weird grammatical constructions, misused speech patterns, and a heavy layer of the word 'fuck'. No matter what the relationship, job, or professional level of attainment, everyone curses a blue streak and uses the word 'ain't'. So this is going to be entertaining.