First, 10-year-old Pia loses her grandma in a freak accident, then she loses all her friends, who shun her by association. Thankfully (or not, if you ask Pia), there's Stefan, the other class outsider; when girls start to go missing in their tiny town of Bad Münstereifel, the pair of outcasts are sure they're hot on the trail of the person responsible.
So far, so good. Nice setting (claustrophobic smalltown in the middle of nowhere), interesting enough, if not breathtakingly original premise, promising protagonists. I really wanted to like this book. But. Well. There are so many things wrong with this obvious first-time effort that I hardly know where to start; how this got published, or at least in this un-researched, badly edited form, is beyond me.
Confession: I've never been to Bad Münstereifel; but reading this book you get the impression that it's peopled by characters from worn-out 60's comedies. There's trusty old Herr Wachtmeister (!) Tondorf making his rounds, lots of nosy old biddies constantly berating kids when not trading malevolent gossip (which they often acquire by entering their unsuspecting neighbours' houses Norman-style), strolling old gentlemen of the friendlier or darker persuasion, and a spattering of faceless-but-mean school kids. (Yes, Ms. Grant's Bad Münstereifel is devoid of anything approaching hipsters, twenty-somethings, students or even teenagers; it's strictly families and pensioners only. I guess once you hit 14, you're out. Sorry. You can come back when you're married, or 60.)
Protagonist Pia's parents seem to be stuck in their own time loop; ringing the doorbell will see mom hurrying from the kitchen, inescapably wiping her hands on a tea towel; she obviously resides in there, lost in the preparation of some hated traditional meat-based German dish or other, while dad usually can be found in the living room, reading the paper (slippers and pipe optional). Characterisation occurs through mention of occupation only (e.g. the Teacher, the Policeman, the Father, the Mom), we never really get to know what makes these people tick, or if there's anything ticking in that empty shell at all.
Sadly, this applies to the main protagonist as well. Pia is a passive sad-sack who never gets actively involved in anything; things simply have a way of happening to her, much to her discomfort and dismay. She yearns for structure and is probably the one child in history that's actually happy when her mom forbids her to go out at night (phew!). Her friend Stefan (characterisation: the Unpopular Neglected Kid) is the one who has to instigate things; Pia just tags along, worrying most of the time, and usually about completely irrelevant things at that -- her main preoccupation throughout the novel is with an unpaid phone bill. Yes. I'm not making this up.
She's stumbling through the action, such as it is, like a befuddled sleepwalker. These gender roles -- the brave, adventurous boy, the timid, helpless girl -- are of course themselves throwbacks to another era, once again giving the impression that the novel is set about 50+ years in the past. There's nothing that anchors the story in the late 90's; no mention is made of popular (at the time) music, movies (remember "Titanic"? "There's Something About Mary"? "The Horse Whisperer"? "Saving Private Ryan"? All movies released that year, which surely found their way to Bad Münstereifel), TV shows, fashion, politics (after an unprecedented 16 years as Bundeskanzler, conservative Helmut Kohl is replaced by moderate socialist Gerhard Schröder -- definitely big news in a conservative little town), news items (Monica Lewinsky; German orthography rules are officially changed, which led to tremendous discussions and arguments nation-wide; near Eschede, a high-speed ICE train derails, killing 101 people -- HUGE news at the time) or technology, other than a passing and half-hearted mention of unspecific video games. These people apparently live in a big bubble of nothing.
Also, a lot of stuff simply didn't ring true for me. For one, there's the whole Exploding Grandma bit -- so Pia's Oma had an unfortunate accident involving an elaborate hairdo, tons of hairspray and an open flame, which is a bit out there to begin with; what I really couldn't believe was that Pia is getting such a hard time from her class mates over this. Oh wait. It's not just her class mates -- it's the whole elementary school! AND the Gymnasium she graduates to half a year later! Actually, it's all of Bad Münstereifel who's positively obsessed with ostracizing the Girl Whose Oma Exploded. Somehow, I found this a bit hard to swallow, especially considering that the novel is set in 1998, not 1890. (Or is it?)
Then there's the business with the child murders. Now, I guarantee you if you've read two crime novels (or less) in your life, you can tell the perpetrator from the start. It's ridiculous. If you're a good-natured reader like me, you might be willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt and think that this is obviously part of an especially clever set-up, playing with the audience's expectations etc. etc. It's not. The lady is serious. And I won't even talk about the so-called motive, which is flimsy at best. Or the conclusion, which just... happens. Somehow. There's a spurt of highly implausible action (some of which, probability-wise, would be more at home in a children's book, frankly), and then things simply fizzle out.
Also, well, the language. I'm a native speaker of German who read this book in its original English, and I found myself gnashing my teeth so much that it'll probably cost me later. A lot of it is not technically wrong, exactly, it's just wrongly applied. Case in point: the exhausting use of the affirmative "doch", which is the answer of choice of virtually every character in the novel, regardless of the question. Now, while there certainly are cases where "doch" would be used, most of the time a normal person would simply say "ja". Or nod. Or shrug, or go "Mm-hmm" whatever. In Ms. Grant's Bad Münstereifel, they say "doch". And they say it a lot. And it gets very grating, especially considering that 8 out of 10 times it's used wrongly.
I wish Ms. Grant had given her debut novel a bit more thought and re-written it as the retro mystery it was obviously meant to be, or put a bit more flesh on its bones and turned it into a bona fide contemporary Germany crime novel, warts and all. As it is, it's pretty bloodless, in all respects.
"Doch, it is," as Pia would say.
