Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Book Summary and Reviews of The Dark Monk by Oliver Potzsch

The Dark Monk by Oliver Potzsch

The Dark Monk

A Hangman's Daughter Tale, Book 2

by Oliver Potzsch

  • Critics' Consensus (1):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • Published:
  • Jun 2012, 512 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

1660: Winter has settled thick over a sleepy village in the Bavarian Alps, ensuring every farmer and servant is indoors on the night a parish priest discovers he's been poisoned. As numbness creeps up his body, he summons the last of his strength to scratch a cryptic sign in the frost.

Following a trail of riddles, hangman Jakob Kuisl, his headstrong daughter, Magdalena, and the town physician's son team up with the priest's aristocratic sister to investigate. What they uncover will lead them back to the Crusades, unlocking a troubled history of internal church politics and sending them on a chase for a treasure of the Knights Templar.

But they're not the only ones after the legendary fortune. A team of dangerous and mysterious monks is always close behind, tracking their every move, speaking Latin in the shadows, giving off a strange, intoxicating scent. And to throw the hangman off their trail, they have ensured he is tasked with capturing a band of thieves roving the countryside attacking solitary travellers and spreading panic.

Delivering on the promise of the international bestseller The Hangman's Daughter, Oliver Pötzsch takes us on a whirlwind tour through the occult hiding places of Bavaria's ancient monasteries. Once again based on prodigious historical research into Pötzsch's family tree, The Dark Monk brings to life an unforgettable, compassionate hangman and his tenacious daughter, painting a robust tableau of a seventeenth-century Bavaria and quickening our pulses with a gripping, mesmerizing mystery.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Readers will also appreciate the nice balance between drama, suspense, and humor: this is a serious story, Potzsch seems to be saying, but it's OK to have some fun with it. At least two more books in the series are forthcoming, and they will be most welcome." - Booklist

"Fans of Michael Gregorio's early 19th-century Prussian series (Unholy Awakening, etc.) will find a lot to enjoy." - Publishers Weekly

"Swift and sure, compelling as any conspiracy theory, persuasive as any spasm of paranoia, The Dark Monk grips you at the base of your skull and doesn't let go." - Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and Out of Oz

This information about The Dark Monk was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Cathryn Conroy

A Really Good Tale Well Told
Part historical novel, part adventure story and part murder mystery, this intriguing book, the second in "The Hangman's Daughter" series by Oliver Pötzsch, is quite the page-turner. Underneath an intricate plot, this is also a none-too-subtle statement about Christianity—the succor and solace it can provide and the harm and injury it can inflict.

It is on an icy cold and snowy day in the winter of 1660 in a small village nestled in the Bavarian Alps that the local priest is found poisoned. And while he was obviously poisoned in the rectory, he managed to drag himself to the church where he arranged his dying body as a clue to a deeper mystery—one far greater and with more importance than just the name of his murderer. With that, the story is off and running as the hangman Jakob Kuisl (just as every town had a blacksmith and a tanner, it had a hangman), his daughter Magdalena, the physician Simon, and the priest's sister Benedikta search for a treasure hidden some 300 years ago by the Knights Templar. Of course, these four are not the only ones who are racing to find the treasure, and their opponents will stop at nothing—even murder and torture—to get there first.

Ingeniously plotted with characters that have real depth and personality, this is a captivating read. And while some parts of the story appear contrived if not actually a bit farfetched, it's all done to further what is, quite simply, a really good tale well told.

A picky historical error: Matches are prevalent throughout this story, which takes place in 1660; however, matches were not invented until 1805.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Oliver Potzsch Author Biography

Oliver Pötzsch, born in 1970, has worked for years as a scriptwriter for Bavarian television. He is a descendant of one of Bavaria's leading dynasties of executioners. Pötzsch lives in Munich with his family.

Link to Oliver Potzsch's Website

Other books by Oliver Potzsch at BookBrowse
  • The Beggar King jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more historical fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

The silence between the notes is as important as the notes themselves.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.