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Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Potzsch, O. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The Beggar King is the third book in Hangman's Daughter, the million-copy best-selling series.
The year is 1662. Alpine village hangman Jakob Kuisl receives a letter from his sister calling him to the imperial city of Regensburg, where a gruesome sight awaits him: her throat has been slit. Arrested and framed for the murder, Kuisl faces firsthand the torture he's administered himself for years.
Jakob's daughter, Magdalena, and a young medicus named Simon hasten to his aid. With the help of an underground network of beggars, a beer-brewing monk, and an Italian playboy, they discover that behind the false accusation is a plan that will endanger the entire German Empire.
Chock-full of historical detail, The Beggar King brings to vibrant life another tale of the unlikely hangman and his tough-as-nails daughter, confirming Pötzsch's mettle as a writer to watch.
Author Notes
OLIVER PÖTZSCH, born in 1970, was for years a radio personality for Bavarian radio and a screenwriter for Bavarian public television. He is a descendent of the Kuisls, the well-known line of Bavarian executioners who inspired his novels.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Potzsch's brilliant third mystery set in 17th-century Germany (after 2012's The Dark Monk), has Jakob Kuisl, hangman (and garbage collector) of Schongau, accused of murder in the Free City of Regensburg, where he has gone to visit his ailing sister. Meanwhile, Kuisl's fiercely independent daughter, Magdalena, an apprentice midwife, accuses master baker Michael Berchtholdt of both impregnating his maid and fatally poisoning her with ergot in an attempt to induce an abortion. Passions against Magdalena run so high that she and her lover, Simon Fronwieser, must flee Schongau. Unaware of her father's jeopardy, Magdalena and Simon head to Regensburg, where they end up racing to exonerate Kuisl and discover the truth behind the murder, which turns out to have wider implications. The author sustains suspense throughout, and both old and new readers will eagerly await the next volume. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Latest installment in the Hangman's Daughter series by best-selling Bavarian phenom Ptzsch. For those unfamiliar with the series, the setup is this: A Bavarian village is missing its executioner, since he's departed the Alps to go wandering around the Europe of the Thirty Years Warera to serve the cause of justice. Said executioner, Jakob Kuisl--based on a historical figure, an ancestor of Ptzsch's--works in a fraught landscape. As the story opens, a piratical bunch of mercenaries, some of them nastily French, are bumping around raping and pillaging: "They sold the booty to women who followed the army in wagons peddling goods, so the gang members always had money for food, drink, and whoring." Such acts have consequences, not just in the diminishment of German fortunes, but also in the swelling of German wombs, and by the time Kuisl is swinging into action three decades later, there are new figures on the scene as a result. One of these is Kuisl's daughter, who finds herself tasked with saving his bacon when off in the big city, and a plot unfolds that threatens not just to end his tenure at the gallows, but also to take down the German royals. Is the head bad guy a ghost? It takes us several hundred pages to chart a career trajectory "[f]rom a mangy mercenary to a respected raftmaster," during which time there are a respectable number of thrills, spills and pools of blood on the tile. Whatever the case, that bad guy is very bad indeed, and to the very end he argues that legitimate rape is no rape at all. Think what you will of that proposition, there's plenty of murder, fratricide, abortion and bad rye bread to go around. Think The Name of the Rose meets The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and you're part of the way there. A reasonably good historical thriller but without much that makes it stand out above a crowded field.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
Old homicide cops never die; they just shuffle off to the cold case department. That's where Michael Connelly's maverick, Harry Bosch, found himself after his ill-considered resignation from the Los Angeles Police Department. The same spirit of insubordination periodically lands a career detective like Jussi AdlerOlsen's Carl Morck in some dead-end division like Department Q. And in the honorable tradition of the watch commander known as the Oracle in Joseph Wambaugh's Hollywood Station procedurals, every veteran seems to feel duty-bound to take one last crack at an unsolved murder before he retires. Come to think of it, every active homicide assignment involving a longtime serial killer seems to lead to the cold case files. Ian Rankin covers all these bases in STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN'S GRAVE (Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown, $25.99). His incorruptible but moody hero, John Rebus, had second thoughts after retiring from the Edinburgh police force and has since made his way back as a civilian employee in the Serious Crime Review Unit. Rebus claims to find satisfaction working these old cases, "each one ready to take him on a trip back through time." But he doesn't come to life until the mother of a teenage girl who vanished on New Year's Eve in 1999 persuades him that her daughter's disappearance set the pattern for more recent missing persons cases, each occurring in the vicinity of the same major highway and all involving young women. Always impressive at handling plot complications, Rankin adds another twist by making Rebus redundant, forcing this ex-cop to take unorthodox action in order to muscle his way into an active investigation. As an outsider, he can ignore protocol and consort with criminals, to the point of activating hostilities between two major underworld figures. But his seditious behavior hardly endears him to the detectives working the current kidnapping, and finally goads an enemy in the complaints department into waging a vendetta to keep him from rejoining the force. ("I know a cop gone bad when I see one.") What's really at issue here isn't Rebus's maverick style but his character. Abrasive, secretive and unable to make nice with his superiors, he's not a team player - never was, never will be. At the same time, he's uncomfortably aware that he's out of step with the new age. As a sad Scottish toast goes: "Here's tae us / Wha's like us? / Gey few - / And they're a' deid." But once in a while some dinosaur like Rebus manages to rise up to show us how to get the job done. Maggie is one gorgeous girl, altogether worthy of playing a leading role in SUSPECT (Putnam, $27.95), Robert Crais's heart-tugging novel about two wounded war veterans who nudge each other back to life after suffering a traumatic loss. Maggie is a 3-year-old German shepherd whose best friend was felled by a land mine in Afghanistan. Scott James, a young officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, went to pieces when he failed to save his partner's life in a street shootout. Scott and Maggie survive their battle wounds, but they're so debilitated by posttraumatic stress that neither is fit for duty - until they partner up in the Metro K-9 Unit. Scott accepts Maggie for all the wrong reasons ("They do what you say, don't talk back, and it's only a dog") because he's desperate to return to the street so he can go after the professional killers who shot his partner. And although Maggie was bred to guard and protect, she has a lot of tough Marine training to unlearn before she can become a nonviolent cop. Although Scott is a good guy who brings high-grade skills to his detective work, it's Maggie who holds us captive, enthralled by Crais's perceptive depiction of her amazing capacities. Maggie may be "only a dog," but she's the leader of her pack. Tim Dorsey's nutty novels about a manic serial killer and his weed-smoking sidekick are fanciful, but they're not nonsensical. Accompanied by his habitually groggy friend Coleman in THE RIPTIDE ULTRA-GLIDE (Morrow, $25.99), Serge A.