Crvena ružica

The main character and narrator is Hella Moormann, a seemingly ordinary fifty-year-old woman from Heidelberg – quiet, a bit boring, a bit mean. After her divorce, she lives alone, works as a pharmacist and is obsessively in love with the younger doctor Levin Gregor. In order to keep him all to herself, Hella begins to systematically remove all “obstacles” – first Levin’s unfaithful lover Rosemarie, then her own sister who kidnapped her ex-husband, and even random acquaintances who bother her.

She carries out all her murders with poisons from the pharmacy (digitalis, insulin, cyanide in coffee), always with a cold smile and a perfect alibi. She keeps a diary in which she justifies her crimes with love: “If someone had to die, at least they died for the right thing.”

Noll masterfully builds tension through Hella’s naive-mean monologue – the reader simultaneously despises and understands the murderer. The humor is black, the irony is sharp, and the ending (the courtroom in which Hella almost wins) is shocking.