Crime Novelist Murdered on Houseboat

The murder of a bestselling author in Germany is like something out of a book. A son of Alexandra Fröhlich visited her houseboat on the Elbe river in Hamburg on Tuesday morning and found she had been violently attacked and killed only hours before. Police believe Fröhlich, 58, died between midnight and 5:30am on Tuesday, but have said little else publicly. Police sources indicate the novelist was shot, per the Guardian.

Investigators have put out a call for witnesses who might have seen suspicious activity around Fröhlich's houseboat on the Holzhafen bank of the Elbe in the eastern Moorfleet district. Divers were at the scene "amid speculation that the weapon could have been thrown into the Elbe," per the Guardian. Local reports indicate at least one relative was swabbed for possible gunpowder residue, per the Independent.

Fröhlich was a former journalist who founded a women's magazine in Ukraine before going on to work at several magazines in Germany. In 2012, she published her first novel, My Russian Mother-in-Law and Other Catastrophes, which spent weeks on Spiegel's bestseller list, as did her follow-up crime novels, both of which centered on family secrets. She's survived by three children. (More murder stories.)