The Collini Case by Ferdinand von Schirach

Recently, I took a couple of books from a book case in my parents apartment block. I grabbed the book Fallet Collini (Der Fall Collini, The Collini Case) by Ferdinand von Schirach. I had never heard about the author, or the book, but the back cover text intrigued me. And what a book. It is seldom that you find a book by chance that turns out to be one of your favourite books, or one of the best you have read. 

"Fabrizio Collini is recently retired. He’s a quiet, unassuming man with no indications that he’s capable of hurting anyone. And yet he brutally murders a prominent industrialist in one of Berlin’s most exclusive hotels.

Collini ends up in the charge of Caspar Leinen, a rookie defense lawyer eager to launch his career with a not-guilty verdict. Complications soon arise when Collini admits to the murder but refuses to give his motive, much less speak to anyone. As Leinen searches for clues he discovers a personal connection to the victim and unearths a terrible truth at the heart of Germany’s legal system that stretches back to World War II. But how much is he willing to sacrifice to expose the truth?"

After the initial beginning, where we follow Collini when he meets his victim, the novel is told from Leinen's point of view. He realises soon that he knows the victim. The case is mixed with stories of his past connections with the victim and his family, and the case.

It is written in a very strict language where even the private parts reads like a protocol, or statement, from the court. von Schirach is a lawyer as well, so should be well aquatinted with the language. This is not a negative things, on the contrary, it gives more emphases to the story. As the case go on and Collini does not want to reveal why he killed the victim, Leinen goes on a private search which leads him to shocking events.

There is a 2019 Netflix movie based on the book. Unfortunately, it is not available on the Swedish Netflix, but maybe in your country? 

I found this information on Wikipedia about his other books. As far as I know, two of them have been published in Swedish, so have to look for them. 

"In August 2009, Schirach published the book Verbrechen ("Crime") with the publisher Piper Verlag. The book remained on Der Spiegel's bestseller list for 54 weeks. The collection of stories is based on cases from his chambers. Rights to the book were sold in more than 30 countries.

In August 2010, his second book, Schuld ("Guilt") appeared, again with Piper Verlag, and again it contains short stories drawing on von Schirach's everyday experience as an attorney.[4][5]

In September 2011, Piper Verlag published Schirach's third book, Der Fall Collini ("The Collini Case"), which reached no. 2 on the bestseller list of Der Spiegel. The book tells of the murder of the industrialist Hans Meyer, who had been a Nazi officer in Italy. It deals, controversially, with the sometimes excessively mild ways in which the post-World War II justice system in Germany dealt with former Nazis.

He has since published another collection of three short stories Carl Tohrbergs Weihnachten ("Carl Tohrberg's Christmas"), a second Novel Tabu ("The Girl Who Wasn't There"), a collection of the essays he wrote for Der Spiegel titled Die Würde ist antastbar ("Dignity is violable", alluding to the first sentence of the German Constitution) and the theater play Terror. The play stages the court trial of an air force pilot accused of mass murder after having shot down a hijacked civil plane which was intended to crash into a soccer stadium. The audience gets to act as a jury and votes on the verdict on which the sentence at the end of the play is then based.

In 2018, he published another collection of twelve short stories, titled Strafe (Punishment). As explained in an interview with Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Strafe completes the trilogy he began with Verbrechen and Schuld; he had always planned it to take this form. Each of the volumes corresponds to the examination order of an indictment in a criminal court of law."