In 1922, a horrific murder of a farmer and his family took place in an isolated village in southern Germany. More than 80 years later, the unsolved killings were reimagined in “The Murder Farm,” a novel by a then first-time writer, Andrea Maria Schenkel.

Published in Germany in 2006, it sold more than one million copies, is required reading for German high school students, is used as a tool to train detectives, was turned into a film released in 2009 and has been translated into 20 languages.

Now “The Murder Farm” has finally come out in the United States, released by Quercus press last week, with the hope that Ms. Schenkel will awaken the same interest in German mysteries that Stieg Larsson did in Scandinavian noir.

In fact, it was Quercus, a British company, that acquired the world English rights to Mr. Larsson’s novels through its MacLehose Press imprint and then licensed the rights to Knopf in the United States. (“The Murder Farm” was published in Britain in 2008).