Franziska Rombach

Rombach never settles on one fixed perpetrator role. In one book it's the husband, in the next the best friend, in the one after that the friendly handyman who services the heating once a month. What stays constant is never the role but the pattern: the threat always comes from the innermost circle of trust, never from outside, and at the start of every book it wears a face people consider harmless, even caring.

That's why her true source of threat always sits early in the book — usually within the first two chapters, long before anyone suspects who it is. And she plants every clue fairly: a baby monitor turned the wrong way. A message that knows a little too precisely where the protagonist was yesterday. A prescription from the pediatrician's office that doesn't quite add up. On a second read, nothing should come as a surprise — it was all there already, just misread.

What her books never do: leave the twist hanging. Rombach says an unresolved ending isn't literary courage, it's a broken promise — anyone who reads her book to the last page has earned the right to an answer, even one that hurts. And her culprits are never evil simply because the book needs a villain. Everyone has a motive you can follow, even if you never condone it — fear of losing control, an old humiliation, a predicament nobody ever found a way out of. In the end, the truth wins out. But what the betrayal destroyed stays visible; no one walks away at the end as if nothing happened.

Rombach grew up in Waiblingen, a small town in the Rems-Murr district on the outskirts of Stuttgart, in one of those row-house developments where every front garden looks equally tended and everyone knows everyone else from parents' evenings at school. Two houses down lived a family considered the friendliest on the street: the father coached the youth football team, always brought the cake with the most compliments to the neighborhood festival, was always the first to say hello. When an ambulance stopped outside that house one evening, Rombach was fourteen. What stayed with her wasn't the ambulance. It was the sentence half the street kept repeating in the days after, always with the same disbelieving shake of the head: But he was always so nice.

She never forgot that sentence. It's the reason she studied psychology, at the University of Tübingen, focusing on couple and family dynamics. During her studies she attended a guest lecture at the university's Institute of Criminology, which was at the time working on a study funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) into femicide in Germany — she never conducted research there herself, but the afternoon a criminologist sketched out the same recurring patterns behind seemingly sudden violence in relationships left a lasting mark on her interest in violence behind a respectable façade. After her studies, she spent ten years working at a family counseling center in the greater Stuttgart area — marriage counseling, parenting counseling, sometimes cases where something entirely different surfaced beneath what people had originally come in to discuss. She was never allowed to simply take over a real story; to this day, confidentiality isn't a form for her, it's a habit. So she started inventing cases that belonged to no one — composite situations built from patterns, not names. She wrote her first story late one night at the kitchen table, really just to be able to sleep herself, after a counseling session wouldn't let her go. The next morning she read it again and realized it was better than any case report she'd ever written.

Today she lives with her family in Fellbach, a few train stops further toward Stuttgart, in a house with a slightly too-large garden and a kitchen where there's always a coffee mug sitting somewhere that really should already be in the dishwasher. She still works two half-days a week at the counseling center — she says it keeps her honest; she never wants to write about families she only knows from the newspaper. She writes early in the morning, before the children's alarm goes off, at a table by the window overlooking the street, where the neighbors are just now unloading their cars and nodding to each other. She says that's the best place to write about the tipping point of the familiar — you just need it right in front of you.

For ten years I listened to people tell me how much they trusted their partners, their doctors, their best friends — shortly before it turned out that this exact person was the problem. Nobody comes to counseling and says: I'm afraid of my neighbor, a stranger. They say: I'm afraid of my husband, and I don't know why, and I'm ashamed to even think it.

That's the sentence all my books circle around. Not the monster in the dark — the question of what you do when suspicion turns against the one person you're supposed to distrust the least. That's why, in my books, every trusted figure gets a plausible, everyday face before becoming a threat, and why I change the role from book to book — a husband, a mother-in-law, a coach. The role is never the message. The message is: look closer, even at the people standing closest to you.

And I resolve every case. Always. My readers have a right to know, by the end, what really happened and why — even when the truth is uncomfortable. I don't artificially heal away what it destroyed. But I owe them an answer. That's the least a book that plays with trust can give back to its readers.