Tag: Criminal

The Fog of the Drug War

It is almost impossible to know exactly what happens when a crime is committed in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador. The basic questions often cannot be answered: Who is the victim? Who ...

All Ireland in a Grave

A hanged man was never more popular. One hundred years ago, the British government executed Roger Casement for his participation in a rebellion in Ireland, the Easter Rising of 1916. This year ...

Impunity

Human skin turns the color of lead as the body loses blood. It’s one of the physical signs, perceivable at plain sight in a homicide victim, marking the boundary between life and death. Another is ...

How To Catch a Philippine Serial Killer

F. H. Batacan’s Smaller and Smaller Circles, a gripping crime thriller, winner of the prestigious Philippine National Book Award and until now available only in the Philippines, begins with the ...

Chronicle of a Soul: Roberto Saviano

“If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” The old adage might be a fit translation of what many Italians thought when Roberto Saviano received death threats from the Camorra (the Neapolitan ...

Murderous Schoolgirls

While little girls may be made of sugar and spice and everything nice, in fiction the teenagers they grow into are anything but. We are drawn to stories where girls are scandalous, promiscuous, and ...

Adventure Capitalists

William Gibson has become a reluctant prophet for cyberculture. Although his early work failed to imagine some technological particulars (like the smart phone), he foresaw that cyberspace—a term he ...

Kids in Cages

In June 2011, the State of California permanently shut down the Preston Youth Correctional Facility, a reform school for orphans and juvenile offenders that had been in operation for over a century ...

Progress and Execution

Frantz Schmidt hanged his first thief when he was 19, on a June day in 1573. Either his father or another master executioner pronounced the hanging “executed adroitly,” concluding Frantz’s ...

The North Is the Dark Place

“The North is the dark place.” The first words of The Daylight Gate will not be surprising to readers familiar with Jeanette Winterson’s gothic upbringing in the north of England (200 Water Street ...

Dudes, Bodies, and Criminals

For those accustomed to the dry wit of judicial opinions, there is an undeniable charm to a novel that, within its first ten pages, paraphrases the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona US Supreme Court case with ...