The novel is set in a small German town named Bad Münstereifel, where everyone knows everyone else and what is going on in each other's lives. The novel opens up with a girl named Pia whose grandmother has exploded and now the whole town knows in just a couple of days.

‘Oma Kristel patted he hair into place, and then sprayed it with the dedication of a car mechanic giving a BMW a respray. She managed to frost her bosom and glistening with tiny droplets and there was a fog of hairspray hanging over her. […] The match slipped out of her fingers, and fell straight onto her pink mohair bosom. With a whooomph! Like the sound of a gas boiler firing up, the hairspray with which Oma Kristel had doused herself ignited obliterating her in a column of flames.

After two days in which Pia hasn’t attended to school, she goes, and hears her classmates still talking about the exploding of her grandmother, and finds out she is now known as the girl whose grandmother exploded.  All of Pia’s classmates are afraid to sit next to her because they think that the exploding of her grandmother is catching and that they will explode also if they sit too near her.  The only person who will sit next to her is nick named StinkStefan by the class. He goes and sits next to her and is now her, as she calls it, ally.

‘I heard the sound of a chair scraping back, and someone stood up.

Oh, no. StinkStefan. He wasn’t even on my table to begin with. […] StinkStefan , the most unpopular guy in the class. If I needed him for an ally, then it really was all up to me.

Pia is also friends with a man name Herr Schiller, who tells her many stories when she visits him and is very kind to her. He tells her many stories about Unshockable Hans, a man afraid of nothing. Pia and Stefan are at the town carnival when they see Katharina Linden by the fountain, dressed in her snow white costume; in fact, they are the last to see her before she disappears.

‘Perhaps that was why Frau Linden failed to notice her daughter’s disappearance at first […] And, after all, Bad  Munstereifel was a small town –everyone knew each other, and even during the karneval there were enough friendly faces around that you needn’t worry about your children. Or so everyone thought.’

Everyone in the town is worried now about their own child’s safety and security is tightened up, and after a while when nothing has happened the town begins to relax a bit.

‘That is, until later, when the next child vanished.’

After the next child vanishes Pia and Stefan decide to take it upon themselves to find out what happened to the two girls. Then they hear the news of Herr Duster being arrested. Herr Duster is Herr Schiller’s brother, although it is hard to believe, they are so different. Herr Schiller seems the good one and Herr Duster seems to be the bad, but this may change.

‘Yes they came yesterday morning and took him away in a police car.’

Pia talks to Frau Kessel, the woman who knows all of the latest gossip in town, and finds out that girls have disappeared before now and that she suspects Herr Duster of kidnapping them, and thinks that now he is at it again.  Pia has to go and stay with her granny in England for the summer, and there she finds out that she will be coming to live in England so she decides to take quick action: she and Stefan visit Herr Duster’s house to look for the missing girls. They think that Herr Duster is still in the police station. They are investigating the cellar when Stefan finds a door and behind it, a well. It is very dark in the cellar and Pia falls into the well. In there she finds what she has been looking for.

‘How many of the things were there in the well with me? Katharina Linden, Marion Voss[…] These things floating like sodden logs in the inky water with me had nothing to do with the missing girls – they had become something else altogether.’

Herr Duster found Stefan and helped him get Pia out of the well. Herr Duster is the good brother in the end and Herr Schiller is the murderer. There was a passage connecting their two houses that only Herr Schiller knew about; he framed his brother for what he did and fled to the Eschweiler Tal. But in the winter snow he left his tracks and Pia, Stefan and Herr Duster followed him. In the end they find Herr Schiller and he is arrested.                                                               

I extremely enjoyed this novel: it had many twists and turns and made the murder look innocent; it was a mixture of fiction and real life, of something that could have really happened in a small German town, and true stories of Unshockable Hans and all the creatures he defeated, which could never be true in real life.

I would recommend this novel to anyone over 11.