The Pledge by Friedrich Durrenmatt

The mysterious and unbearably tense tale of a detective’s obsessive pursuit of a child murderer, from one of the post-war era’s greatest writers in German

When a young girl is found brutally murdered in a Swiss mountain forest, the brilliant Inspector Matthai can’t put the case behind him. Not even when a local felon is arrested. Not even once the suspect has confessed.

Matthai promises the girl’s mother that he will stop at nothing to find the real killer.

Adapted into a Hollywood film, The Pledge is the chilling story of a man in desperate search of the truth. A man driven to sacrifice everything, to commit acts of cruelty and obsession in a desperate search for a killer he can’t find.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) was a Swiss author and dramatist, most famous for his plays The Visit and The Physicists, which earned him a reputation as one of the greatest playwrights in the German language. He also wrote four highly regarded crime novels - The Pledge, The Judge and His Hangman, Suspicion and The Execution of Justice, all of which will be published by Pushkin Vertigo.