A Crime: A Novel

A Crime picks off where Bernanos's novel A Bad Dream left off, with the community of Mégère and its new parish priest dealing with murder. The seeming peace of the French countryside is broken by the discovery of two bodies: the victim of A Bad Dream, and a mysterious stranger. As the combined force of police and priests comes to a halt in their investigation, Bernanos immerses the reader in the whirlwind that crime generates, one that "invincibly drags to its core the innocent and the wicked." Bernanos portrays the spiritual ruin that preceded the killings and the startling identities of their perpetrators in those cryptic, forbidding depths.

A Crime, imbued with the necessary murder-mystery atmosphere of disturbing suspicion and abrupt brutality, is a reckoning with virtue and evil that only Bernanos' spiritual genius could conceive.