The Execution of Justice - Hardcover

Durrenmatt, Friedrich

3.62

1,446 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224025082 ISBN 13: 9780224025089

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1989

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In 1935 Dr Isaak Kohler, a distinguished Zurich councilman, walks into a restaurant full of well-known politicians, businessmen and artists, and shoots a university professor in open view. For his crime, Kohler is sentenced to twenty years in prison. Dr Kohler, happy as a lark and infectiously content behind bars, sends for Spat, a young, down-on-his-luck lawyer and asks him to re-investigate his case on the supposition that he is innocent. Spat does the seemingly impossible - he manages to have the murderer acquitted - and in the process is driven to madness. The lawyer becomes obsessed with his intellectual enterprise and, seduced by the notion of justice, decides to murder the murderer. Durrenmatt tells the final part of the story in his own voice, and reveals the sorry fate that befalls Spat after he becomes the unwitting participant in Dr Kohler's conspiracy of revenge. The Execution of Justice is a brilliant allegorical thriller that dramatises the distinction between justice and the law.

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Review:

'The Swiss master of the astounding plot' --Sunday Times Crime Club

'It's not that D�rrenmatt always took the road less chosen, more that he carved out an entirely different and perverse path through the literary undergrowth' --Crime Time

'The novel has the most wonderful collection of strange and charismatic characters. Ingenious... original... challenging' --Nudge Books

About the Author:

Friedrich Durrenmatt began to write in 1947, steadily gaining a reputation as the foremost representative of the 'new generation' of German writers. Born in 1921 in one of the German-speaking sections of Switzerland, his work has now been widely translated, and his plays performed in Japan, South America and throughout Europe. His most recent novel was The Assignment.

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