Bad Wolf

When a young woman’s body washes up in a river, Pia Kirchoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are tasked with finding out who she is and the identity of her killer. Meanwhile, a local talk show host is pursuing a story that could put her back on the map when she’s attacked. There is also a young mother who has concerns about her daughter’s change in behavior while dealing with her husband’s infidelity and the impending arrival of her second child. When it turns out that the three cases are connected, the heat is on to find the responsible parties. The deeper Kirchhoff and von Bodenstein dig, the more disturbing the information they start to reveal, and for Pia, the implications strike close to home.

The story is told from multiple show more third-person viewpoints, with some first-person accounts from a young girl recalling games her father used to play with her. The multiple viewpoints work well, throwing information at the reader that can easily lead them down the wrong track. The story suffers a little in the middle, with more emphasis on background building than moving the story forward. The last half of the book flies, though, with the loose ends neatly tied up. Just when I thought I had it all figured out, the author managed to surprise me. Rarely explicit, I found some elements of the story emotionally distressing. Though the framework of this novel is fiction, it explores the horrifying reality of sexual violence against children.

I thought this was a great book and if you enjoyed Snow White Must Die and Ice Princess I'm certain you will enjoy Bad Wolf as well. My only complaint is that certain events in the personal lives of Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein, addressed here, have taken place in the fifth book of the series which has not yet been translated. I don't mind reading out of order if the gaps are addressed in later books in a way that gives you some sort of understanding. I hope we can get a translation of Those Who Sow the Wind (Book 5) soon. I did see that the seventh book, I Am Your Judge, will be out in January. show less

Sitting down to write this, my first thought was...where do I begin? This is one of the most compelling, affecting novels I've read & the characters & their stories continue to reside in my head. If you can finish this book & blithely pick up the next one on your reading list, you're made of stronger stuff than I.
This is the 6th in Neuhaus' Taunus series, featuring DS Pia Kirchhoff & her boss Chief DS Oliver von Bodenstein of the Kripo Criminal Police in a district of Frankfurt.. They've been through a lot together professionally & individually in their personal lives.
Pia has been living with Christoph for several months now & things are going better than she expected. He is a kind, gentle man, the perfect foil to balance the stress of show more her job. Oliver is starting to see the light at the end of his previously miserable life. After the acrimonious end of a long marriage, he's regained self confidence & is looking forward to moving into his own place & a renewed friendship with an old classmate.
It all begins when some drunk teens stumble over the body of a young woman lying in shallow water. When Pia & her crew arrive, they are horrified by her wounds. Dr Henning Kirchhoff's (Pia's ex) autopsy reveals a multitude of old injuries caused by years of abuse. It brings to mind an unsolved case from 9 years ago of another young girl found dead in similar circumstances. But none of them are prepared for the chain of events that will follow.
In a concurent side story, we meet Hanna Herzmann, an ambitious & successful TV journalist famous for her Jerry Springer style interviews. She's recently kicked out husband #4, her miserable, self absorbed daughter Meike is moving in for the summer & worst of all, she's in a ratings slump. Then her therapist summons her to a clandestine meeting with two men, a reformed biker named Bernd & Kilian Rothemund, a disgraced lawyer/convicted child molester. The story they tell her is chilling & unbelievable but may be the scoop of the year.
In serial interludes through the book, there are passages detailing the life of an anonymous child. She's a little girl who loves horses & is the apple of her father's eye. He spoils her, buying clothes like the funny red cape with a hood. She knows that she wore it for their "special times" together with his friends but strangely, all she can remember is being afraid of the big bad wolf.
Meanwhile, Emma (old high school chum of Pia's) is dealing with being hugely pregnant during the hottest summer in memory, an increasingly distant husband & strange, sudden behavioural changes in her young daughter.
There are 5-6 story lines that start independently but it's only as the author begins to skillfully weave them all together that we get an idea of the true scope of the plot. The cast of characters is large & well developed. Each has a distinctive voice as events unfold & the tension builds. But Neuhaus is a master of misdirection & as Pia uncovers all the secrets & lies, we too learn of hidden connections & identities. More than once, I was shocked to find out what I'd come to believe was completely wrong. There is a mounting sense of dread & while Pia in particular becomes a target, no character will emerge with the life they had before.
This is more than a police procedural involving multiple murders. Some of the subject matter is very disturbing but unfortunately, true to life. There are graphic descriptions of assaults involving adults but crimes committed against children are mostly alluded to & occur off the page. Your imagination will take over & you desperately want to see some of these people get what they deserve.
This is a riveting page turner you'll resent having to put down & I stayed up waaay too late finishing it. Yes, it's unsettling but so well written that you're quickly hooked & have to know how it all pans out. By the end, many aspects of the case are resolved but not all, leaving us to wonder if some of these characters will pop up in subsequent books. If you enjoy compelling, gritty & complex thrillers, this is for you show less

Publishers do both the author and their readers a disservice when they opt to translate series out of order. Snow White Must Die was the first book authored by Nele Neuhaus to be released in English with this, Big Bad Wolf, the second, but in the original German the titles are the 4th and 6th respectively and I’m irritated by the resultant gaps. While it is true that the cases the team investigates are resolved within the framework of a single novel, the characters personal stories are ongoing and the missing details do have an effect on my enjoyment of, and my attachment to, the series. @ Goodreads

With that rant out of my system…

As is Nuehaus’s habit, she begins Big Bad Wolf by introducing several seemingly unrelated characters show more and incidents, which slowly merge as the story unfolds. These include the discovery of a dead girl whose autopsy reveals signs of extensive and sustained abuse, an unscrupulous television host on the trail of a big story, a convicted pedophile on parole, a bikie gang leader, a woman worried about the changes in the behaviour of both her husband and daughter, and a vindictive Internal Affairs officer. As Chief Detective Inspector Pia Kirchoff and her partner, Detective Oliver von Bodenstein, investigate they begin to piece together the details of a horrific conspiracy which threatens to overwhelm them both.

With the large cast and multiple story threads, Big Bad Wolf can initially feel a little overcrowded and disjointed, but patience is eventually rewarded if you persevere. The story slowed for me around the middle, chiefly because I made the main connections very early and as such felt as if I was waiting for Pia and her team to catch up, but the shifts in character perspective ensures the pace rarely lags. The conclusion is tense and dramatic, but not as neat as may be expected.

Though rarely explicit, I found I had to put the book down at times and take a deep breath, finding some elements of the story emotionally distressing. Though the framework of this novel is fiction, it explores the horrifying reality of sexual violence against children and the extent of the network that trades in it.

Overall, I thought Big Bad Wolf to be an absorbing and satisfying police procedural, though the premise is challenging and may be difficult for some readers. The translation is skilful, I only wish I had the opportunity to read the fifth novel to eliminate the gaps in the development of Pia and Oliver’s character. show less

[Bad Wolf] by Nele Neuhaus
4★'s

From The Book:
She looked at herself in the mirror, touched her fingertips to the little red hood on her head, and laughed. The dress was a real dirndl, with a short skirt and apron. Papa had plaited her hair into two braids, and she really looked exactly like Little Red Riding Hood in her fairy-tale book.
He always brought presents―it was a secret that she and Papa shared, because he never brought anything for the others. Only for her. She was his favorite.
The door opened, and she uttered a frightened cry when she saw the wolf. But then she had to laugh. It wasn't a real wolf after all; it was only Papa, who had put on a costume. How lovely it was that she was the only one to share this secret with show more Papa. Too bad she could never remember anything afterward.

On a hot June day, the body of a sixteen-year-old girl washes up on a riverbank outside of Frankfurt. She has been brutally murdered and shows signs of long-term abuse, but no one comes forward with any information as to her identity. Even weeks later, the local police have not been able to find out who she is. Then a new case comes in: A popular television host is attacked, raped, and locked in the trunk of her own car. She survives, barely, and is able to supply only vague hints to the police, having to do with her recent investigations into an organization whose members are from the highest echelons of society, and the potential uncovering of a shocking history they'd prefer to keep from the public eye. As the two cases collide, Inspectors Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein dig deep into the past and underneath the veneer of bourgeois society to come up against a terrible secret that is about to impact their personal lives as well. It is almost too late for a person very close to Pia before she and Oliver finally track down the big bad wolf.

My Thoughts:
A word of warning: This book deals with one of the most disgusting of crimes, child molestation, and how frequently it occurs.

The book has a slow beginning but it's not too far into it that it really picks up speed and you find that you just can't put it down. Combining police procedural and a favorite Grimm’s fairy tale is a winning combination. It begins with the discovery of a girl's body on a river bank in Frankfurt and evolves from there into a masterfully told tale of crime and evil.

Much of the first few chapters was devoted to setting up the situation...but from there it was non-stop action once the story was in place. Be prepared for false clues and betrayals, along with genuine leads. The novel leads to a satisfactory but not necessarily believable conclusion I think the author's main purpose of this novel was to show how child abuse can affect everyone...victims...families and many, many others. show less

If there is one series that I wholeheartedly recommend reading if you are a fan of crime novels is it this one. I simply adore the Bodenstein & Kirchhoff books. So far, have I read 3 books, and all of them are 5-star books. This is the second book I read. The only sad thing is that not all the books are translated into English (nor Swedish). However, Lucky me have one more unread book to read, THE ICE QUEEN!

What I loved about the first book I read, SNOW WHITE MUST DIE, was that there was so much going on. Both when it comes to the case as Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein private lives. The same thing can I say about BAD WOLF. I'm always intrigued by stories that take a while before you started to see a pattern. Like a puzzle, you show more slowly start to put the pieces together and as the story progresses you start to realize the truth. In this case, you have quite early one a feeling of dread.

BAD WOLF is a fantastic crime novel. Nele Neuhaus has such a fabulous ability to write that I get so engrossed in what is going on that I just devour her books. I found this book to be a bit hard to read, not because of the writing, but because of the subject.

It's not the monster under the bed that is frightening, it's the one walking in plain sight out in the sun. It's the bad wolf that is hiding in plain sight that we should be wary of... show less

Published in English as Bad Wolf

Pia Kirchhoff gets called out of her high-school reunion party, to investigate the grisly murder of a young Jane Doe. While the initial clues don't seem to lead the detectives anywhere, things slowly start to point towards a long reaching sex trafficking organization, that won't shy back from lashing out at anyone...

The details of the investigation, along with its many intricate and dramatic ramifications made for quite a riveting story. The other three parallel threads also held my attention for most of the book. The personal touch however, is still an issue in Ms. Neuhaus' crime novels. Maybe it's a problem with characters in German books showing emotion differently from their American counterparts. Or show more perhaps it's the language subtleties that still evade me. Don't get me wrong, I was horrified at the details of all the sex trafficking, but I didn't necessarily care for any of the characters in particular.

And what pray happened to Bodenstein's screen time? The author seems to have forgotten about him a third way in, and only remembered that he was one of the titular characters towards the end; when the guy gets (ironically) frustrated at not being kept in the loop. Let's hope this is not a sign that he'll be phased out in the future...

All in all, I guess I'm closer to having liked the book, than feeling the need for nitpicking its faults. Which is my way of saying that this was one of the better mysteries of the series. So you should definitely give it a go.

Score: 3/5 stars

I was going to conclude this review with how much better a movie version of this story would have been. Turns out, there is one already, but it has Pia reduced to a mother-figure, while Bodenstein solves the whole case by himself. Pretty tone deaf for an episode tackling such a sensitive topic as the sexual trafficking of young girls.

For those interested, the TV series is called Taunuskrimi, and the images posted in the review are stills from episode 7 (part 2 of the Böser Wolf arc).

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Review of book 1: Eine unbeliebte Frau
Review of book 2: Mordsfreunde
Review of book 3: Tiefe Wunden
Review of book 4: Schneewittchen muss sterben
Review of book 5: Wer Wind sät show less

This is one of the best I've read in Nele Neuhaus' police procedural series featuring detectives Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein. Characterization is the strong point in the series, and this novel excels. It is the sixth novel in the series (though not the sixth to appear in English), so the central characters have had time to fill out and to develop nuanced relationships with each other, and with subsidiary characters. Several of the other characters in the novel are also strongly developed: this is a well-populated thriller, but there is never any risk of confusing characters. The plot is compelling, if a bit over the top -- as so often in crime fiction, one must suspend the will to disbelieve. But the novel is a compelling show more read, and leaves me waiting for another to appear in English. show less