The Vale of Confusion is Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s last novel: an accomplished satire composed of deftly interwoven narrative strands which combine scenes from Swiss rural life, encounters with the divine, and excursions into the world of organised crime. Friedrich Dürrenmatt portrays Switzerland as a morally and economically corrupt country riddled with international criminal organisations whose activities are, however unwittingly, supported by the Swiss population.

From the moment F., a woman filmmaker, accepts the assignment to go to the Al-Hakim ruins to investigate the rape and murder of the wife of Otto von Lambert, a psychiatrist, she finds herself becoming the central character in a deepening mystery. In the unnamed Arab country where the crime occurred, she is unwittingly involved in a labyrinthine quest for an elusive truth, with frightening consequences at every turn. Under vigilance by the police, she discovers a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband. But what is even more unnerving, F. is trapped in an increasingly apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, espionage, and terrorism.

In The Judge and his Hangman (1950) Dürrenmatt's investigator takes to the stage for the first time: Inspector Bärlach, an old fossil of the judicial system. For health reasons, he has only very little time left to solve a murder case. Bärlach's approach to the issues of justice, morality, guilt and punishment is a common thread running through all of Dürrenmatt's crime novels. In Suspicion (1951), for example, the inspector fights once more against death and injustice, driven by his boundless defiance at »existing in this world and fighting for another one, a better one«. In The Pledge (1958) another investigator, Matthäi, doggedly tries to hunt down a child-murderer, showing no fear of danger or its consequences. Justice (1985) focuses on a young lawyer's entanglement in the delicate web of justice, the judicial system and morality. Dürrenmatt began his fifth (and uncompleted) crime novel The Pensioner (1995) as early as 1969, but kept re-writing it. The novel's protagonist, the ill, gluttonous Inspector Höchstettler, is the spitting image of Bärlach.