by John Glatt
First published 2023
Josef Fritzl appears to live an ordinary life in Austria with his wife Rosemarie. The 73-year-old retired engineer has raised three of his grandchildren after their mother Elisabeth supposedly ran away to join a religious sect years earlier. Only Josef knows the truth. For over twenty years, he has kept Elisabeth captive in a bunker beneath his own house, where she has given birth to seven children by him. One infant died three days after birth. Three others live with Elisabeth in the underground prison while the remaining three were raised upstairs by Josef and Rosemarie. When one of Elisabeth's children falls seriously ill in 2008, the nineteen-year-old girl must leave the bunker for the first time to seek hospital treatment. Her emergence into daylight threatens to expose Josef's decades of unspeakable cruelty and the horrific secret hidden beneath his respectable facade.
Genres: historical-fiction, abuse, mystery, crime
Vibes: dark, emotional, intimate, suspenseful
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Austria
Period: 20th-century
304 pages · Paperback · Filia
Content warnings: abuse, child-abuse, kidnapping, sexual-assault