The Execution of Justice
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3.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A captivating neo-noir classic from one of the masters of the genre
A respected professor is dead—shot in a crowded Zurich restaurant, in front of dozens of witnesses. The murderer calmly turned himself in to the police. So why has he now hired a lawyer to clear his name? And why has he chosen the drink-soaked, disreputable Spät to defend him?
As he investigates, Spät finds himself obsessed, drawn ever deeper into a case of baffling complexity until he reaches a deadly conclusion: justice can be restored only by a crime.
The Execution of Justice is a dark, wicked satire on the legal system and a disturbing, if ambivalent, allegory on guilt, justice, violence and morality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Zurich multimillionaire and local politician Isaak Kohler shoots a professor to death in broad daylight for no apparent reason, he cheerfully accepts his 20-year prison sentence. Yet, despite the fact that there were witnesses aplenty, he enlists Spat, a down-and-out lawyer, to investigate the crime, ordering him to pretend that someone else, now at large, committed it. Through luck and happenstance, the greenhorn attorney pulls off the impossible: an acquittal. In the process, Spat falls in love with Kohler's daughter Helene, whom he suspects is an accomplice. He also meets a femme fatale whose auto racer boyfriend beats her, a dwarfish heiress surrounded by wee, bald bodyguards and sundry small-time crooks. Did Kohler shoot the professor as an abstract, fiendish mental game, or was Swiss pistol expert Benno the real culprit, as the newspapers rashly proclaim? Narrated by Spat, whose obsession with the case nearly drives him over the edge, this quirky tale by Swiss playwright-novelist Durrenmatt ( The Assignment ) is a dark, wicked satire on the legal system and a disturbing, if ambivalent, allegory on guilt, justice, violence and morality.
