Tobias Sartorius has served 11 years in prison for the murders of both his girlfriend and ex-girlfriend at the start of German author Nele Neuhaus's Snow White Must Die. When he is released and returns to his hometown of Altenhain, he finds the town has turned its back on his family, reducing his parents to ruins. Graffiti covers his house, stores refuse to serve him and neighbors hurl insults as he crosses town. Then a teenage girl in the town goes missing, and Tobias is once again cast under suspicion--but everything may not be as clear as it first appears. A skeleton is discovered in a local airfield, a woman is pushed into oncoming traffic and now two police detectives, Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein, believe Tobias may have been wrongly accused all those years ago. But if that is the case, who did kill the two girls? And what is Altenhain working so hard to hide from the world?
Neuhaus's near-perfect thriller is slow to start, setting up details and complexities for each character and situation. The wait is worth it, though: once Neuhaus really gets going, she hurtles readers towards a fast and unexpected conclusion, with enough twists and turns to keep us guessing to the very end. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm