It is now 1354, and in the Alsatian village of Colmar Efi, Appel, and Grita’s ale business is going extremely prosperously: that is until Efi founds a hand in their ale cauldron; a hand without a body. A hand that apparently belongs to someone from Vogelgrun, a village quite a distance from Colmar.
As the three alewives fight to keep suspicion from falling on them (and possibly dooming their business), they have questions to answer: how did the hand wind up here? Where is the rest of the body? Will that be the only murder? Why do the village leaders immediately suspect Grita? Who else is a suspect? And is this hand going to stand in the way of Efi finding herself a new husband?
This book was as good as the first one. Once again though, the murderer is identified maybe twenty pages from the end; though this time with the added thrill of depression and futility-fueled dismemberment. A murderer that the three women practically stumble across the identity of. As realistic as it may be, the motive was a little “really? You’re religious, and you think this is worth breaking a Commandment and possibly going to Hell over?”
Brother Tacitus is getting real old, real fast: compared to Brother Wikerus of the Tragic and Mysterious Backstory, I don’t think a lot of the wives of Les Tannuers are going to be opening their doors to him.
And we have the three leads: Appel the town pump/back-alley abortionist, Efi the incurable flirt whose actions almost lead to things going even worse with the murders, and Grita: the rageaholic who loathes her children and her husband yet would kill anyone who harms them (and in this book, apparently shows how exactly she wound up with so many children.)
What made this book (and the series so far) so enjoyable yet so frustrating, is that the behaviors and the personalities of the characters are so realistic; you know people like this, and they probably aggravate you as much as the characters do each other. What I continue to find as one of the delightful things about this book is the fact that there are really no truly decent men shown here; all the men are drunks, braggarts, thieves, letches, are extremely lazy, extremely arrogant, extremely gluttonous, extremely self-pitying, or extremely lazy. The women aren’t perfect by a long shot either, but they actually seem to try and get things done in the world. And for a society that claims that men are in charge, the men spend a lot of the book either being bossed around by the women, or trying to hide from the women and their womanly ways.
I appreciate how much Andersen researched this book to make it as realistic as possible. One criticism (which is not in any way the author’s fault) is that since this started out as an e-book, the spacing on some of the words is a little off; there is at least one instance of a word having its first letter on one line with the rest on the following one. That’s about all I will say as a negative; I really enjoyed this book, and definitely plan on reading the third (and as of now, the last) book in the series.
