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.

This is a test or most of the 500 pages is padding

I don't think I can spoil The White Lioness considering the author does a pretty good job of doing it himself so I'm not going to worry about it.

Mr. ex-KGB agent and the evil South African racists have this weird fetish for talking about how ruthless and cold they are. It's grown to cartoon villain level proportions. Seriously, even without the eeevil plotting and reminders of how much they love stomping on others and murdering innocents I would buy them as not particularly nice. For crying out loud, they're attempting to assassinate a man who represents the hope of their country so they can plunge it into civil war in order to justify further repressing the black majority. You could show them happily playing with a puppy and the possibility of bloody unrest would still be lurking in the reader's mind. There's no need to show them kicking the puppy as well.

Anyway, Wallander is something of an example of informed ability. The author and the bad guy keeps saying how clever and talented he is but I just don't see it. Yes, he does a bit of solid investigating but most of his discoveries are through sheer luck and plot contrivance. Mr. ex-KGB agent wonders how Wallander could ever have discovered and followed him again and I'm like, you just blew up his fucking apartment and abducted a man from it at gunpoint, he didn't have to look very far. Wallander continues to act in a disordered manner by not bothering to tell anybody what's been happening because apparently only he can bring things to a satisfactory conclusion. Or so he keeps insisting. Because none of the others understand what's going on. Of course they don't! You haven't told them jack! If you told them who they were supposed to be looking out for maybe your daughter wouldn't have been kidnapped! Telling someone to tell someone to watch your father's house is a lot more effective when the people on watch know what they're doing there.

The section that I just read ends with one of the detectives asking, "How will it all end?" Well, my guess is the daughter doesn't die, Nelson Mandela doesn't get assassinated, and Wallander's amazing ability to stumble into the right scene will save the day.