Melanie Raabe, the German thriller writer whose debut Die Falle is now a Netflix series

Melanie Raabe

Photo: Harald Krichel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 1, 1981 Jena, East Germany
Occupation	Novelist
Awards	Deutscher Kurzkrimi-Preis · Stuttgarter Krimipreis, debut category

A woman who has not left her house in more than a decade switches on the television and sees the face of the man she believes killed her sister. The police never solved the case. So she does the only thing she knows how to do: she writes a thriller about the murder, and arranges for that man, a well-known journalist, to interview her about it. That is the premise of Die Falle, the debut that turned Melanie Raabe from a Cologne journalist who wrote in secret at night into one of Germany’s best-known crime novelists, and this autumn it is a Netflix series.

The six-part adaptation comes from Constantin Film and from Isabel Kleefeld, who wrote and directed it with the team behind Liebes Kind, the German Netflix hit that won an International Emmy. Friederike Becht plays the reclusive novelist, renamed Lisa Konrad (Linda Conrads on the page), opposite Hans Löw as the journalist Robert Lenzen. “Over several weeks, we really staged a duel,” Becht said in Netflix’s press notes, describing a fight her character “prepared for meticulously, both mentally and physically.” Early English-language reviews praised her and argued about the plot; Ready Steady Cut headlined its verdict “Too Twisty For Its Own Good”, which is also roughly why Raabe’s readers come back.

Raabe was born in Jena on 1 August 1981, in what was still East Germany, and spent her early childhood in the Thuringian village of Graitschen. Her biological father, a contract student from Benin, had to leave the GDR before she was born; she never met him. In November 1989, as soon as the border opened, the family moved west and settled in Wiehl, in the hills east of Cologne. She studied media and literary studies at Ruhr University Bochum, then moved to Cologne to work as a freelance journalist. At night, as her website puts it, she secretly wrote books.

The apprenticeship was in short form. In 2011 her story Die Zahnfee took first place in the German short crime fiction prize at the Tatort Eifel festival, and in 2014 she self-published an e-book, Die Hässlichen, under the pen name Melanie Vega. Then came Die Falle. Before it reached German shops, rights had already sold to France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the English-speaking market. It was presented at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2015, released simultaneously as an audiobook read by Devid Striesow and Birgit Minichmayr, and greeted by Die Welt with the headline “Melanie Raabe, diese Frau ist eine Sensation”: this woman is a sensation.

Hollywood moved quickly. In June 2015 The Hollywood Reporter revealed that TriStar Pictures had acquired the film rights, and Michael Heyward of Australia’s Text Publishing told the trade paper that his team had first heard about the book at the Frankfurt Book Fair “and were instantly intrigued by its premise of the central character writing a novel to catch her sister’s killer.” Grand Central published Imogen Taylor’s English translation, The Trap, in the United States in 2016, the same year the novel won the debut category of the Stuttgarter Krimipreis.

What followed was a run of high-concept psychological thrillers, all published by btb in Munich. Die Wahrheit (2016), published in English as The Stranger, begins with a businessman who vanished on a trip to South America; seven years later his wife is told he is alive, and the man who greets her at the airport, in front of the press, is a stranger. Der Schatten (2018) sends a journalist from Berlin to Vienna, where a beggar tells her she will kill a man named Arthur Grimm. It was shortlisted for Austria’s Leo-Perutz-Preis, and in 2023 ZDFneo turned it into a six-part series directed by Nina Vukovic, with Deleila Piasko in the lead, which won the audience award at the Seriencamp festival. Die Wälder followed in 2019.

After that she slowed the pulse without abandoning suspense. Die Kunst des Verschwindens (2022) and Der längste Schlaf (2024), the latter built around prophetic dreams, are what her publisher calls Spannungsromane, novels of tension rather than straight thrillers.

Alongside the novels, Raabe has built a second career around how creative work gets done. Kreativität (2020) is a nonfiction case for creativity as a source of courage and happiness; Lady Gaga (2021) is her contribution to the KiWi Musikbibliothek series from Kiepenheuer & Witsch; Das Jahr der Wunder (2025) offers a year of small creative prompts. She wrote the fiction podcasts Der Abgrund and The Quest, and since 2019 she has co-hosted the podcast Raabe & Kampf with the designer Laura Kampf, about art, creativity and freelance life. She is a reading ambassador for the Stiftung Lesen foundation and a NABU ambassador for the common swift. The line on her homepage, “Ich schreibe Bücher, und Bücher schreiben mich” (I write books, and books write me), reads less like a slogan than a job description.

The comeback arrived in late August 2026. Daisy. Und all deine Geheimnisse werden mir gehören is, by her own count, her first thriller in seven years. Its heroine, Luca, is a 34-year-old lawyer at a Berlin firm whose small flat is crammed with books, records and case files. At night she quietly visits people who got away with something, leaving a daisy as her signature, until posters start appearing around the city that read like threats addressed to her. It is the cat-and-mouse game Raabe has been refining since her debut, now with the hunter as the hunted.

This autumn she is touring Daisy through bookshops, libraries and a cinema, with one reading on 7 November in the town hall of Graitschen, the village she left as a child in the weeks the Wall came down. With Netflix sending new readers back to Die Falle and a new thriller in the shops, the writer who once worked on her novels in secret has rarely been so visible.

Tags: Netflix, Folarin Balogun, Lady Gaga, Seo Kang-joon, crime fiction, Fernanda Castillo, Friederike Becht, Isabel Kleefeld, Melanie Raabe

Melanie Raabe, the German thriller writer whose debut Die Falle is now a Netflix series

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