Andrea Maria Schenkel

Who is Andrea Maria Schenkel?

Andrea Maria Schenkel is a German writer. She published her debut novel Tannöd in 2006.

Based on the Hinterkaifeck murder in the 1920s, Schenkel’s fictional account takes place in the 1950s. She describes, in ghastly and suspenseful detail, how a small Bavarian village, called Tannöd, became the unlikely site of a horrific crime.

In her novel, a whole family - the farmer, his wife and children, the maidservants and farm laborers - are all killed in one night.

Nobody had liked the family: they had been unfriendly, greedy and crabby. But now after the outrage, fear dominates life in the village. Nobody knows the murderer. Slowly, anxious and shocked every witness gives his statement. Speculation and assumptions about the case are described in a direct, merciless and impressive manner.

With her debut novel, Andrea Schenkel presents not only thrilling crime and fiction. She also draws the pitiless portraits of a bigoted and unromantic rural society influenced by traumatic relations that finally lead to death.

More than one million copies were sold in Germany.