Patti McCracken

“Yes. I am an Angel maker.”

In Nagyrév, a small village beside the Tisza River in Hungary, Suzannah Fazekas known as ‘Auntie Suzy’ relishes her role as midwife. It not only brings her material benefits like a home supplied by the village council, and a healthy salary, but also an authority over life and death seldom questioned. This is why, and how, Fazekas was able to kill with impunity for over twenty years.

Combining years of research with a creative narrative, Patti McCracken tells a compelling story of a murderous conspiracy in The Angel Makers, which has ‘Auntie Suzy’ at its heart. With arsenic steeped from flypaper the midwife assisted the women of Nagyrev, and further afield, to dispatch as many as 160 husbands, inconvenient relatives, and unwanted infants. Likely more. It’s an astonishing tale of hubris, greed, and narcissism on the part of Suzannah that played out early in the 1900’s, though the motives of some women she ‘helped’, particularly those who were victims of abuse and poverty, were often more complicated. Ultimately indictments were brought against sixty-six women and seven men (as accomplices) from Nagyrév, Tiszakürt, and Cibakháza. Twenty-nine women and two men went to trial for the murder of forty-two men. Sixteen women, and both men, were convicted.

The Angel Makers has a storytelling narrative, unraveling not unlike a murder mystery novel. McCracken evokes an authentic sense of place and time, and I feel her portrayal of the people involved in the case are generally convincing and nuanced. There is perhaps an overload of description at times which I felt slowed the pacing.

A fascinating examination of a sensational true crime case, The Angel Makers is an interesting read. And the postscript is sure to leave you stunned.… (más)