"Friedrich Durrenmatt is considered one of the most significant playwrights of our time. During the years of the Cold War, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. In this ALTA National Translation Award-winning new translation of what many critics consider his finest play, Joel Agee gives a fresh lease to a classic of twentieth-century theater. Durrenmatt once wrote of himself: "I can best be...

A veteran police detective, on the day of his retirement, handles the case of a seven-year-old girl who has been brutally murdered. When a mentally retarded man confesses to the murder and then kills himself, the detectives consider the case closed, but was he actually the murderer? Before long evidence is uncovered that suggests the the girl was just one in a series of brutal killings involving young girls and a mysterious man.