Taking us back in history to a place where autopsies were blasphemous,
coffee was an exotic drink, dried toads were the recommended remedy for
the plague, and the devil was as real as anything, New York Times
bestselling author Oliver Pötzsch's The Hangman's Daughter is the
rollicking start to an exciting series of historical mysteries, bringing
to cinematic life the sights, sounds, and smells of seventeenth-century
Bavaria, telling the engrossing story of a compassionate hangman who
will live on in readers' imaginations long after they've put down the
novel.Magdalena, the clever and headstrong daughter of Bavarian hangman
Jakob Kuisl, lives with her father outside the village walls and is
destined to be married off to another hangman's son -- except that the
town physician's son is hopelessly in love with her. And her father's
wisdom and empathy are as unusual as his despised profession. It is
1659, the Thirty Years' War has finally ended, and there hasn't been a
witchcraft mania in decades. But now, a drowning and gruesomely injured
boy, tattooed with the mark of a witch, is pulled from a river and the
villagers suspect the local midwife, Martha Stechlin. Jakob is charged
with extracting a confession from her and torturing her until he gets
one. Convinced she is innocent, Jakob, Magdalena, and her would-be
suitor race against the clock to find the true killer. Approaching
Walpurgisnacht, when witches are believed to dance in the forest and
mate with the devil, another tattooed orphan is found dead and the town
becomes frenzied. More than one person has spotted what looks like the
devil -- a man with a hand made only of bones. The hangman, his
daughter, and the doctor's son face a terrifying and very real enemy.
