"Guilt," Stories by Ferdinand von Schirach Ferdinand von Schirach is both a German criminal defense lawyer and an exceptional prose stylist, as evidenced by his devastating new volume of stories, a sequel to a similar and even stronger collection called "Crime." That book was a critical and commercial success in Germany and received fine notices when it was published here last year. There's a trick to many of von Schirach's stories, one that works every time. A narrator describes a terrible crime in a controlled tone that withholds judgment and even verges on amusement. That tone is von Schirach's great achievement: understated, resigned, worldly, hard-boiled. Then, near the end of the tale, often very late, there is a shift from third-person narration to first, from the literary to the legal. A lawyer takes control, describing the modest steps he has made to guide the case toward an invariably unsatisfactory conclusion. The effect is unsettling; it underscores not only the horror and absurdity of what happened early on, but how little the legal system can do to establish facts or assign blame, much less set things right. The uneasiness running through these stories seems rooted in von Schirach's discomfort with the role of the criminal defense lawyer. The work is necessary and probably ethical, he suggests, again and again. But it may not be moral. In the first story, about a gang rape at a town fair, an insecure young lawyer waits with eight colleagues in a courthouse hallway for a decision that will free all their clients, many of whom were surely guilty. He wears a new suit and tries to fit in. "Like all lawyers," he confesses, "we were exchanging jokes; we didn't want the situation to get the better of us, and now I was one of them. At the end of the hall a sergeant was leaning against the wall; he was fat and tired and he despised every one of us. It's hard to judge a translator's work based on just one end of the transaction, but Carol Brown Janeway's English rendition suggests she has retained and perhaps even amplified the power of von Schirach's prose. He has a nice eye for detail and juxtaposition, although he sometimes indulges a taste for the lurid, one that calls to mind the torture porn of the "Saw" movies and Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho." These passages are disturbing, and they can feel like slumming. Far more successful is von Schirach's casually sympathetic attitude toward his perpetrators. They are damaged, overwhelmed, stupid or undone by sexual desire, and they make catastrophic mistakes. They are guilty, yes, but it is not always obvious that punishing them serves a purpose. The stories offer fascinating glimpses of the legal system in Germany. Prison sentences there are shorter than those in the United States, prosecutors are meant to stay neutral and former convicts seem to have a fighting chance at rejoining society. In the afterword to his first collection, von Schirach compares the two systems with characteristic perspective and detachment. Yet in the larger scheme, which is the only scheme that really concerns him, he concludes that "the differences between our two justice systems are insignificant." "Guilt" suffers a little when compared with its predecessor, which was richer and less schematic, probably because in that book von Schirach was drawing on the best material from his years of practice. But if these new stories are leftovers, they're still awfully tasty. Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court for The Times.