Snow White Must Die is a psychological thriller combined with a crime mystery. In the book, Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are detectives investigating a strange traffic accident. A woman, Rita Cramer, was pushed from a bridge onto the car of a passing motorist below. Cramer is from a small village outside Frankfurt, Germany, and the detectives find a bigger mystery once they arrive in her hometown.
Cramer's son Tobias Sartorius has just returned to town after serving a prison sentence for the disappearance and murder of two teenage girls eleven years before. Bodenstein and Kirchhoff, along with the rest of the town, suspect he's the guilty party when another young woman turns up missing. Tobias, however, doesn't remember the first murders and claims to be uninvolved in his mother's accident and the newest disappearance.
The residents of the town know more than they are willing to admit to outsiders Bodenstein and Kirchhoff, however, and this hampers the investigation. Small town people have small town minds, at least in this case. Working without the support of the townspeople, the two detectives find unexpected connections between the new cases and the murders more than a decade before.
Author Nele Neuhaus is well-known in her native Germany for her Bodenstein and Kirchhoff series of psychological thrillers about the male and female detective team. Snow White Must Die is the fourth of six books Neuhaus has written about the pair, but it is the first to be translated into English. It is already an international best seller. The translation was done by Steven T. Murray.
"This novel was chock full of so many interesting characters that led us on so many twists and turns in trying to find out who was really responsible for the murder of two girls 11 years ago, that Tobias Santorius was convicted of doing and served a decade of his life in prison for. Once Tobias is released and returns to the small German village where it happened, Pandoras Box is opened and all hell breaks loose. Great read and an absolute page-turner!"
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Margot (4 out of 5 stars)