Meet Fahner, the retired small-town doctor who resorts to the garden axe when his patience with his cruel wife runs out.

Meet Patrick, so entranced by the sight of his sleeping girlfriend that he cuts a small piece out of her back, just to see what she tastes like.

Meet the silent assassin who calmly despatches two Neo-Nazi thugs on a railway platform.

A nameless lawyer invites us to read an extraordinary dossier of violent and unspeakable acts. All the crimes have one thing in common: the guilty have never been convicted in a court of law. But however heinous the crime, the narrator shows how the human circumstances behind events can tell a different story.

Small literary gems * The Times *
Mesmerizing * New York Times *
A strange and scary fictionalised casebook -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent, Books of the Year *
What makes these tales stand out are not the extremes of their protagonists but the narrator's voice: resistant to melodrama, dryly funny...never less than humane. If Crime shows the arbitrary nature of justice, it also backs the underdogs -- Adrian Turpin * Financial Times *
A wonderful debut, gripping from the very first page and not a word out of place * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *
A magnificent storyteller * Der Spiegel *
The storytelling is poised and beautiful -- William Leith * Evening Standard *
The stories von Schirach tells here are compelling in their own right but he elevates them to something greater with his calm, precise narration. These are like 20 or more mini episodes of The Killing (acutally, they would make for an amazing television series). They are masterpieces in miniature. I cannot recommend them highly enough * Me & My Big Mouth *
Schirach is a defence lawyer in his native Germany, and these tales of individual crimes read almost like a real-life case-by-case study -- Lesley McDowell * Independent *
My book of the year: a dazzling double-bill exploring unusual criminal cases… hypnotic, heartbreaking prose -- Christopher Fowler * Financial Times *

Ferdinand von Schirach was born in Munich in 1964 and is one of Germany's most prominent defence lawyers. Verbrechen (Crime) became an instant bestseller in Germany when it was launched in 2009.