THE ANGEL MAKERS

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.