One of the foremost courtroom lawyers of his generation. Alan M. Dershowitz takes controversial stands based on the principle of equal justice for all. Along the way, he has authored the #1 New York Times bestseller Chutzpah; the bestselling account of the Claus von Bulow case Reversal of Fortune; and the bestselling courtroom drama The Advocate's Devil. Now Dershowitz has written a novel that is at once personal, passionate, and towering: an explosive legal thriller that pits Dershowitz's literary alter ego, attorney Abe Ringel, against the worst crime of the twentieth century -- the Holocaust.
What if you witnessed the most abominable deeds that human beings can inflict upon each other? What if you came face-to-face with the very man who had slaughtered your family before your eyes? That is the question confronted by a celebrated professor named Max Menuchen. Max has found the man who had killed his entire family in cold blood more than a half century before. Max, who has never before broken a law, cannot turn down his chance for revenge.
In 1943 Marcellus Prandus was a Lithuanian militia captain who carried out the blood-thirsty orders of his Nazi commanders during World War II. Today he is an old man living outside Boston. For Max, who has discovered Prandus's identity by chance, killing him is not enough, because Prandus is already dying of cancer. How can Max make Prandus suffer exactly as Max himself did? Can Max bring himself to assassinate Prandus's children and grandchildren and make the old man watch his family die, as Max himself was forced to do?
By the time defense attorney Abe Ringel enters the case, Max has carried out an astounding act of revenge, and America'sgreat Holocaust trial has begun: an explosive legal and moral struggle to find the light of justice within the darkness of human evil. With Max facing almost certain conviction, Ringel desperately tries to prove his actions we
The old man shifted his shaking right leg from the brake
pedal to the accelerator as he aimed his 1989 Volvo directly at the spot
where the eight-year-old child would soon cross the street. In less than
a minute the smiling blond-haired boy, on his way to a second-grade
assembly at the Sancta Maria Elementary School, would be a bloody heap
of shattered bones. Within the hour his family would receive the dreaded
news that their child and grandchild had been struck down.
The old man behind the wheel -- the man who was about to murder an
innocent child -- did not appear capable of such violence. During his
nearly forty years in America, he had never broken a law, never
knowingly hurt anyone. Now his long-festering need for revenge would be
satisfied. Finally his moment was at hand. He had just learned something
so terrible, so unforgivable, that he was willing to break any law or
commandment, to incur any punishment, in order to secure his just
revenge.
As the old man watched the portly crossing guard wave the youngster
across the street, he slowly pressed his foot down on the gas pedal. The
towheaded boy skipped toward the center of the street, holding a
baseball glove and a ball. The old man gunned the accelerator. As the
car lurched toward the terrified eight-year-old, the old man's mind
exploded with the images that had brought him to the point where he
could murder a child.
