Dead Girls; Council of Twelve

I enjoyed Graeme Cameron's first book, "Normal", and didn't realize this was a sequel. Excellent! It was pretty good, not quite as good as "Normal", but still suspenseful. The unnamed serial killer suspect got away in the end of the first book, and so did his captive, Erica. It looks like she might have been in cahoots with him rather than his prisoner, but Detective Ali Green doesn't think so. She's working hard to find "That Man", as she thinks of him, and clear Erica's name, but the evidence is getting more and more puzzling. Of course it doesn't help that Ali herself is suffering from amnesia and other health issues related to the injuries she suffered trying to rescue Erica.

The seventh in the Hangman's Daughter series did not disappoint. Jakob has been invited to the hangman's council of twelve in Munich, and he takes his whole family along with him. He's trying to get his youngest daughter, Barbara, married off, unaware that she's pregnant. Magdalena is hoping she and Simon can find a good school for their eldest son, Peter. Simon is hoping he can get a well respected doctor to look at his treatise on how to prevent disease and infection by washing (it's 1672, after all, so that particular discovery was still in the future). As soon as they get to Munich, they stumble upon a young woman who's been murdered. While the council meets, more murders occur, and the townspeople are blaming the ill luck brought by having so many executioners in their midst, but the murders actually go back decades. There was a lot going on, but as usual Potzsch ties it all together very nicely.