The Murder Farm (2006)

The Murder Farm begins with a few introductory words from an unnamed narrator:

"I spent the first summer after the end of the war with distant relations in the country.
During those weeks, that village seemed to me an island of peace. One of the last places to have survived intact after the great storm that we had just weathered.
Years later, when life had gone back to normal and that summer was only a happy memory, I read about the same village in the paper.
My village had become the home of 'the murder farm' and I couldn't get the story out of my mind."

And the narrator is correct: you won't get the story out of your mind any time soon. The Murder Farm is one of those novels that once you begin reading you shouldn't plan to do anything else until it's over. It's not your average whodunit, so if that's what you're looking for, pass. This is more of a novel of psychological fiction rather than a true-blue mystery novel.

The book is set in the 1950s, after the end of World War II in Germany and the American occupation. The central focus of the novel is the Danner family, who live on their isolated farm in the woods.When they are not seen for a few days, a few of the villagers go to the farm to check things out and find the entire family dead -- someone has taken a pickaxe and killed the entire family -- Mr. and Mrs. Danner, their daughter Barbara, her two small children, and a young maid who has just begun to work at the farm. Throughout this dark and gloomy book, the unnamed narrator mentioned above gathers the stories of the people who live and work in the village, and through their narratives it becomes quite apparent that the family was not popular and not very well-liked. But there are some things that not even the narrator is privy to -- interspersed with the testimonies of the villagers are other third-party narratives which leave you to wonder a) how much you're reading is simply gossip and how much is the truth, and b) who might have wanted this entire family dead.

It is truly difficult to believe that this is Schenckel's first book. The bleak tone of the novel is set at the beginning and although the prose is sparse, it only accentuates the air of gloom that follows through the entire novel. The Murder Farm offers a psychological portrait of a family living in isolation as well as a brief glimpse at how the war affected the people in the village. But what it offers most is a crime which is at once both realistic and believable, making it all the more creepy the further you go into the story.

Very atmospheric and bleak, The Murder Farm is a very good read, one I would recommend without hesitation to any reader of crime fiction. It will keep you turning pages until the very end. ( )

I believe I got caught up in the hype on this one. Not to mention the cover art. Good cover art can really sway me. I'll buy a book I would generally have not interest in just because it has rivetting cover art.

This is basically the dosier of a murder in a rural, German town. I really enjoyed feeling as if I was the investigator who was reviewing all the interviews trying to tie it all together. Trouble is, it was too easy. And the additional narrative that tied all the interviews together was not nearly as creepy as I had expected.

Overall, this was a bit of a letdown, but so short a read, it was still worth it. ( )

A family: man , wife, their daughter, her two children and a new maid are all brutally murdered at a secluded farm. As one of the characters notes, “…there’s no God in this world, only Hell. And Hell is here on earth in our heads, in our hearts. The demon’s here in every one of us, and everyone of us can let our demons out at any time.” A fitting message for a novel set in the countryside of post-war Germany where demons were loosed, demons that were, for the most part, ordinary people, just like the murderer who is caught in a web of circumstance, naivety, and a burst of passion that carries him beyond the pale with the willful taking of lives. Schenkel writes in a very spare, terse style, almost like a documentary. The story mixes the present, the past, and the future, the latter in the form of police reports of the impressions or knowledge of various persons who had known the murdered family. It is a novel about secrets of lives and families. In the end, however, while I didn’t dislike the book, it is not one that I would urge on others, compared to other new mysteries and writers out there. Maybe it’s the lack of a strong central character whom we can like or dislike and whose life we share, as opposed to a story in which the incident itself is the character, clever though Schenkel is in unraveling it.

As the Times reviewer said "Remarmable, sparse, chilling". The mix of personal reports and interviews of witnesses drawing you relentlessly to the crime and the muderer is compelling. Very good atmoshpere. ( )

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/node/4803 ( )