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.