Slowly unfolding tale of death by poison in early-20th-century Hungary. In Hungarian farm country, writes longtime journalist McCracken, spring is the time of year when farmers pull muscles, suffer accidents, and wear themselves to the bone. In a village called Nagyrév, an herbalist and midwife known as Auntie Suzy administered potions to deal with everything from diarrhea to heart palpitations. She also kept a stock of arsenic, about which she bragged to a local member of the gentry, "There is enough in here to kill one hundred men. No doctor could ever detect it." When people, mostly very young children and middle-aged men, began to die, it helped that Auntie Suzy was the de facto doctor and coroner, ascribing death not to her medicine but to consumption and other maladies. When suspicion finally landed on her, she defiantly called herself not a murderer but "an angel maker" and then "spilled forth what was to her not a confession, but a manifesto on the role of a midwife." Meanwhile, other women divined that poisoning was a good way to get rid of their enemies, and between 1914 and 1929, authorities believed, hundreds of victims died in Nagyrév. Some suspects walked, others swung at the end of a rope, others committed suicide. The story is not unknown, but neither has it been stretched out to this length--and yet it's not quite complete. McCracken might have done more to tease out themes of class, racism, and sexism, and often the narrative loses dramatic tension, feeling more like a police report than a thriller. Where there is action, it is often weighted with unnecessary observations: "She sank her spoon into the meaty soup. She knew she would nap better after a hearty meal." A judicious trimming and attention to such matters would have helped the text. Though a tiny footnote in a violent time and place, McCracken's story holds some small interest to true-crime buffs. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Journalist McCracken debuts with a compulsively readable account of a group of women who operated a murder ring for years during the early 20th century in the Hungarian village of Nagyrév. At the center of the ring was a squat, pipe-smoking midwife known as Auntie Suzy, who carried arsenic in her pocket and doled it out to women who were tired of their abusive spouses and sickly children. After a series of anonymous notes to authorities in 1929 and decades of mysterious deaths, 16 women went on trial for poisoning their husbands and sons in a case that riveted the world press. They were all convicted: three of them were hanged, and three--including Auntie Suzy--died by suicide rather than face life in prison. It's thought, the authors writes, that over the years hundreds of men of Nagyrév were slipped arsenic into their brandy, soup, or goulash by the women in their lives. McCracken grounds the work in archival documents and trial transcriptions, and dramatically recreates scenes for which there's no documentation, a liberty, she admits in a note, she has taken "with deep respect for the integrity of this case." This is a must for true crime fans. Agent: Joe Veltre, Gersh Agency. (Mar.)

They called her Auntie Suzy: a pleasant, friendly woman who acted as a midwife in a village in Hungary a century ago. Most readers, even devoted fans of true crime, have probably never heard of her. And yet she was the leader of a ring of women who committed dozens, maybe hundreds, of murders over a period of perhaps 15 years. This is journalist McCracken's first book, and it is simply excellent. The storytelling is dramatic and compassionate; unlike works of crime nonfiction that relate facts at a journalistic remove, this book feels like it was written by someone who cares deeply about the victims of the crimes. There are a lot of mysteries surrounding this story: for example, there are conflicting accounts of how the "murder ring" was uncovered, and the total number of victims remains uncertain. Historical accounts conflict with one another. As much as it is possible to do so a century later, McCracken separates the wheat from the chaff and arrives at a representation of events that seems to tell the real story of the crimes--both who committed them, how they did it (distilling arsenic from flypaper), and how Auntie Suzy and her gang were finally apprehended.

Award-winning journalist McCracken's debut depicts the shocking true story of one of history's largest murder rings. McCracken begins with the difficult job of midwives and mothers, as told through a story about a woman known as Auntie Suzy, the town's midwife and de facto doctor, who used her position and access to arsenic to help the impoverished, overburdened women in her community handle abusive husbands. Startlingly, what started as a death here and there became one of the world's largest mass murders with more than 160 male victims. McCracken's background as a journalist is clear in her approach to the story and its telling. She brings to life a portrait of 1920s village life in modern-day Hungary. Readers will be transported through the story beginning with the issues plaguing local women, how the killers became emboldened over time, and the ways in which justice was brought forth, once an anonymous letter captured the attention of authorities. VERDICT True crime readers are sure to enjoy this debut. --Mattie Cook