Susanne Ayoub Engelsgift (Angels of Death) Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, February 2004. 368 pp. ISBN 3-455-00220-X In 1938 all Austria was breathlessly following with the details of a spectacular murder trial, at the conclusion of which a woman named Karoline Streicher, also known as 'The Angel of Death', was sentenced to hang for a series of grisly murders. Sixty years later, the case, which shook the nation then, has an electrifying effect on scriptwriter Marie Horvath. Marie had been sunk in a state of mental torpor as a result of a traumatic accident. Jolted back to life after reading about the case, she succeeds in tracking down the only surviving member of the Streicher family, Karoline's son Hermann. What she learns from him forms the basis of this chilling cliff-hanger. Karoline Streicher herself was a middle-class girl with the reverse of a middle-class girl's genteel upbringing. Abandoned by her mother into the care of a washer-woman, she is virtually sold to a paedophile insurance agent. She marries him, he dies in a fire, she is accused of his murder but acquitted. By now notorious, she marries again, loses her own and her husband's money but produces Hermann, her son. Hermann, Marie discovers, hated his mother and she him, yet he nonetheless maintains that she was not responsible for the string of corpses of family and friends who died as she fought her way to new wealth. So who was the murderer? The finger points to Gudrun, Karoline's sister-in-law, an equally embittered and hate-filled member of the clan. But more surprises are in store and the plot thickens, until Marie herself, in the most shocking twist of all, is in line to be the final victim. Plausible, ingenious, and an unputdownable read, this sensational novel is rendered even more atmospheric by its authentic evocation of the era in which it is set: the era of poverty, disillusion and desperation which followed the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War.