The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch

And unlike some stories in the genre, The Hangman's Daughter only gets better as the climax approaches - an exciting duel between the hangman and his nemesis. 'Readers who like a plot-driven story with identifiable heroes and villains will be drawn to this ambitious novel. The hangman, his daughter, and the doctor's son face a terrifying and very real enemy. More than one person has spotted what looks like the devil - a man with a hand made only of bones. 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. Convinced she is innocent, Jakob, Magdalena, and her would-be suitor race against the clock to find the true killer. Jakob is charged with extracting a confession from her and torturing her until he gets one. 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. It is 1659, the Thirty Years' War has finally ended, and there hasn't been a witchcraft mania in decades. And her father's wisdom and empathy are as unusual as his despised profession. 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.

The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch