Guilt
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
This devastating dossier of savage stories takes us to the crimes that never reach the newspapers: small-town atrocities where the mundane lurches into the macabre and ordinary people find themselves at the heart of horrific crimes, all the more compelling on account of their truth.
Opening with an attack on a waitress by a band of musicians in a beer tent, we are led through the rituals of the Illuminati by a violent schoolboy sect, and invited to look into a briefcase full of photographs of mutilated corpses. There is the saga of a bungled drug heist involving a stolen car and a dog full of laxatives; the jealous husband who almost bludgeons his wife's lover to death; and the final chilling story of an eccentric madman who cleverly turns the tables on his own defence lawyer...
Ferdinand von Schirach enacts this very same reversal on us: to read his disturbing accounts, told in cool, exacting prose, is to lose one's innocence and come to the frightening conclusion that, in some cases, guilty parties can be exonerated and perpetrators are often indictable by their guilt long before they are by the law.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Von Schirach (Crime) draws on his background as a criminal defense attorney in these fourteen stories all based on real events that call into question the nature of guilt and innocence. He does not pass judgment on his characters, opting instead to observe them through his sparse prose. In Children, false accusations of sexual assault ruin the reputation of an innocent office furniture sales rep, and he considers murdering his accuser out of desperation. In DNA, Nina and Thomas, a young homeless couple, get away with killing a man. Years later, once they have risen out of poverty, investigators find new evidence, reopen the case and bring the two in for questioning. The stories are rich with such details, as von Schirach consistently captures the humanity of his subjects and forces readers to reconsider the morality of their decisions. The most striking piece is Anatomy, a brief but powerful journey into the mind of a man planning to kill a woman who had rejected him. The story is gruesome both in the details of his murderous plot and in the ethical quandary von Schirach presents when the man is struck dead by a speeding car before he can commit his crime. The driver is convicted of manslaughter, and readers are left wondering where guilt really lies. Though his stories are succinct, von Schirach manages to absorb, repulse, and shock readers through his economy of language in this transcendent collection.
