The Mare is based on the true story of Hermine Braunsteiner, the first person to be extradited from America for Nazi war crimes.

Hermine was a brutal concentration camp guard, who was nicknamed ‘the Mare’ by prisoners because she kicked people to death. After the war, she married Russell Ryan, an American man holidaying in Austria, but hid her past. They lived together uneventfully in Queens, New York, until she was tracked down by a New York Times journalist tipped off by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Russell insisted they’d got the wrong person. His wife, he said, “wouldn’t hurt a fly.” However, it was indeed her. Despite hearing witness accounts of the atrocities she had committed, Russell stood by Hermine through her extradition, trial and imprisonment in West Germany, choosing to believe her version of events: that she was an ordinary woman caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Mare tells this story for the first time in fiction. It explores how an ordinary woman could descend so quickly into evil and asks why her husband chose to stay with her despite discovering what she had done.