Review: THREE BAGS FULL, Leonie Swann

• 
  This edition read on my Kindle (AmazonAU)
  
• aka THE SHEEP DETECTIVES
• Anthea Bell (Translator)
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0DT4QXTD9
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Allison & Busby, Publication date ‏ : ‎ 20 March 2025
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 347 pages 
• First published in 2005, English translation from German by Anthea Bell 2006, published Random House 2006, 351 pages, ISBN 978-0-385-60994-4
• Review written in 2009 

Synopsis (AmazonAU)

On a hillside near the quaint Irish village of Glennkill, the flock gathers around the dead body of their shepherd, George, who lies pinned to the ground with a spade. George cared deeply for the sheep, reading to them daily, and as a result they are far smarter than your average flock.

Led by Miss Maple, the sharpest sheep in Glennkill (and possibly the world), they set out to find George's killer. With an assortment of woolly investigators on the case, there are furtive missions into the village and a collection of two-legged suspects to chew over.

Dazzingly original, Three Bags Full introduces a band of detectives who are a breed apart.

My Take

Just recently the film THE SHEEP DETECTIVES starring Hugh Jackman has been recently released and The Chooser in our book group decided the book that the film was based on, THREE BAGS FULL,  would be on our list this month. For me this was a re-read as I originally read the book soon after it was released. My review from 2009 is here.

A word of warning for would-be readers. The film THE SHEEP DETECTIVES has a PG rating. The film really takes one or two themes out of the original book, the main one being the death of the shepherd and the attempts by his sheep to solve the problem of his murder. Various other cozy elements were then added to the story. The original book went well beyond that.

In fact after originally reading the book over 17 years ago I had forgotten most of the story, and began to feel a little bit duped because the plots were far from identical to that of the film.  

Once I had got over those feelings, I did enjoy the re-read, and the rather woolly sense of humour embedded in it. 

My rating: 4.4

Review: SNOW WHITE MUST DIE, Nele Neuhas

• Originally published in German in 2010
• English translation 2012 by Steven T. Murray
• Published by PanMacmillan
• ISBN 978-1-4472-2708-3
• 371 pages
• Review copy supplied by Pan Macmillan Australia

Synopsis (Amazon)

On a rainy November day police detectives Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are summoned to a mysterious traffic accident: A woman has fallen from a pedestrian bridge onto a car driving underneath. According to a witness, the woman may have been pushed. The investigation leads Pia and Oliver to a small village, and the home of the victim, Rita Cramer.

On a September evening eleven years earlier, two seventeen-year-old girls vanished from the village without a trace. In a trial based only on circumstantial evidence, twenty-year-old Tobias Sartorius, Rita Cramer’s son, was sentenced to ten years in prison. Bodenstein and Kirchhoff discover that Tobias, after serving his sentence, has now returned to his home town. Did the attack on his mother have something to do with his return?

In the village, Pia and Oliver encounter a wall of silence. When another young girl disappears, the events of the past seem to be repeating themselves in a disastrous manner. The investigation turns into a race against time, because for the villagers it is soon clear who the perpetrator is—and this time they are determined to take matters into their own hands.

An atmospheric, character-driven and suspenseful mystery set in a small town that could be anywhere, dealing with issues of gossip, power, and keeping up appearances.

My take

Twenty year old Tobias Sartorius was convicted of the murder/manslaughter of two girls last seen entering his house late at night. The evidence against him is purely circumstantial, there are no bodies, and Tobi himself claims alcohol-fuelled amnesia about the events of the night.

Now, eleven years on, he has been in jail, and returns home to the village, to his parents' house. He is not aware that his parents' marriage has broken up, his mother has left home, and his father's restaurant business has collapsed. The setting has an almost Gothic feel to it - his father's house is sombre and the villagers are very much against Tobi's return. It is a village of many secrets. It seems many of them actually know what happened the night the girls disappeared. Was Tobi simply a convenient scapegoat?

At the beginning of the novel there are at least three complications to the plot: Toby's mother is seriously injured after falling from a pedestrian bridge into the path of an oncoming car; a girl's body turns up in a fuel tank at a disused army base; and a girl with an uncanny resemblance to one of the missing girls (nicknamed Snow White) begins work in a local pub.

I found the writing style of the novel peculiarly flat. This may simply have been the effect of the translation but it seemed to me to be a novel where events rather than characters were important. I wondered if I was being cynical by thinking this was a novel written with an eye on television adaptation. Certainly the title is eye catching and before long you recognise that while one Snow White is dead (and who killed her is the question) another is in danger. There's a sinister Gothic quality to this village and secrets that need to be uncovered.

For my personal taste though, SNOW WHITE MUST DIE has too many sub plots, too many characters (who all seem to be related), and is too long. In addition some strands connect this novel with earlier ones in the series, although of course this is the first available in an English translation.

I kept thinking about what has made this novel so popular with German readers. Part of the answer must lie with the title and the marketing, but there's a flavour that sets Nele Neuhaus apart from her British and American counterparts. It seems to me that German readers have different expectations in their crime fiction, but perhaps there is also such a thing as a German "style".
It is something I have noticed before in novels such as Jan Costin Wagner's ICE MOON, and Paulus Hochgatterer's THE SWEETNESS OF LIFE.


My rating: 4.0

SNOW WHITE MUST DIE appears to be #4 of a series of 6 featuring detective duo Pia Bodenstein and Oliver Kirchhoff. A stand alone SWIMMING WITH SHARKS seems to be the only other title by Nele Neuhas available in English.

Other reviews to check

• Maddy Van Hertbruggen on Reviewing the Evidence
• Bernadette @ Reactions to Reading

Author information

Nele Neuhaus is one of the most widely read German mystery writers. More than two million copies of her books are currently in print. She lives near Frankfurt, Germany.

Check the author's site for more details 

P.S.  I noticed a starting point similarity between SNOW WHITE MUST DIE and Michael Robotham's SAY YOU'RE SORRY.
In the latter two teenage girls also go missing, and, despite an extensive police search, their bodies are never found. However there is no convenient circumstantial evidence about who is responsible. So the actual plots are of course very different.

I find books where the authors have similar starting points very interesting, particularly as you explore how they give very different treatments to subsequent events.

Review: THREE BAGS FULL, Leonie Swann

First published in 2005, English translation from German by Anthea Bell 2006, published Random House 2006, 351 pages, ISBN 978-0-385-60994-4

The premise of THREE BAGS FULL is simple. Glenkill shepherd George Glenn is found dead in the paddock, murdered, a heavy spade stuck through his middle. So we have a murder mystery.

But what isn't so simple is that the tale of the investigation is told from the point of view of his flock, a rag taggle collection of rare breeds put together by George for their wool and rarity. George has been working on their intelligence too, reading to them every day. The cleverest sheep in the flock is Miss Maple, and her enquiring mind won't let her leave the puzzle of George's death alone. She is assisted by some other notable characters such as Othello, a black Hebridean sheep with four horns, who was once in a circus, and Mopple, a very stout Merino ram who never forgets anything.

Miss Maple impatiently scraped grass and earth up with her hoof. 'But it happened,' she said. 'There must be an end to the story. If George had finished the detective story we would know how it ended. And I want to know. You want to know too, I know you're curious about it. You just don't want to bother your sheepy heads.'

'It's too much for us,' said Cordelia, embarrassed. 'So many human things that we can't understand. And there's no-one to explain words to us now.'

Seeing things from a sheep's point of view with half-understanding can certainly be extremely perplexing and I thought Swann did a very good job of passing this perplexity on to the reader. There were times I was really scratching my head trying to work out what on earth was happening. I think I got the events straight, and I certainly know who killed George.

There were glimmers of ANIMAL FARM in this book, but Swann's ability to sustain the satire is nowhere near as good as Orwell's. There are some interesting characters among the flock, and also among the townspeople. We are given lots of clues that enable us to piece together events that have occurred in the last seven years (the span of a sheep's memory).

But this is not a book that will suit the impatient reader. Other reviewers have commented on how slow it is in patches, and I don't think Leonie Swann manages to sustain it's allegorical nature all the way through.

How to categorise it? A cozy perhaps, but not particularly light. There are little puzzles that keep the grey cells working all the time, and it is easy to miss a clue or two, with the result that what is happening becomes totally incomprehensible. There's humour too - Melmoth the disappearing ram for example; the minister hearing confession behind the grill and then discovering it is actually Othello in the box; the Winter Lamb, a troublemaker with a yen to be involved.

My rating 4.3

Other people's reviews:

• The Library Ladder loved it
• EuroCrime points to an excerpt
• Books and Musings from Downunder found it a bit drawn out
• Kittling Books said it had her thinking, smiling, chuckling
• 50 Books Challenge said it was a "delight"