A suspenseful tale of a police inspector's unremitting search for a psychopathic killer his superiors claim does not exist. But more than a novel of crime and detection, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's deeply moving drama is the eloquent account of a decent man's gradual decay. With grim irony, the master storyteller shows how a dedicated law-enforcer's obsession for truth and justice can lead him to bait a trap as morally offensive as the evil strategy used by the maniacal murderer he relentlessly pursues.

In 1955 Dr Isaak Kohler, a distinguished Zurich councilman, walks into a restaurant full of well-known politicians, businessmen and artists, and shoots a university professor in open view. For his crime, Kohler is sentenced to 20 years in prison. Dr Kohler, happy as a lark and infectiously content behind bars, sends for Spat, a young, down-on-his-luck lawyer and asks him to reinvestigate his case on the supposition that he is innocent. Spat does the seemingly impossible - he manages to have the murderer acquitted - and in the process is driven to madness. The lawyer becomes obsessed with his intellectual enterprise and, seduced by the notion of justice, decides to murder the murderer. ›The Execution of Justice‹ is a brilliant allegorical thriller that dramatises the distinction between justice and the law.

Dürrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. Among his most well known and most successful plays are ›The Visit‹, ›The Physicists‹, ›Romulus the Great‹, ›Hercules and the Augean Stables‹ and ›The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi‹.