Crime and Guilt, by Ferdinand Von Schirach
Tis the season for shopping mall scuffles. A man with a red face prized the last Magimix (steel, 600 rotations per minute) from my hands yesterday, citing ‘the stress of January sales’. I got an apology, but not the blender. What is it that makes us so quick to flip? In a far bleaker arena, this is a question that plagues Ferdinand von Schirach, the criminal defence lawyer whose most recent novel, The Collini Case, I reviewed here last year. Von Schirach’s earlier books, Crime and Guilt – both bestsellers in Germany – are compilations of stories derived from real life offences. Von Schirach has been involved in literally hundreds