"Dreaming, means telling lies to yourself, and in order to tell lies to yourself, you must first learn to tell lies to everyone," says the hero of "A Crime". A phrase that perfectly summarizes the harsh and icy atmosphere that prevails in Mezer (in Greek the word means "midwife"), a small town where one night a young priest arrives to replace the recently deceased parish priest. He has not settled well, and wakes up in the middle of the night his predecessor's maid, telling her that he thought he heard voices and gunshots. Indeed, an elderly woman has been murdered in her tower. But on a nearby hill lies dead a man, perhaps her murderer. As if that were not enough, Mrs. Louise, the tower's housekeeper, takes a lethal dose of morphine, while the body of a boy from the church choir is found floating in the river. The reader suspects, of course, that the newly arrived priest, who disappears, is not unrelated to all these deaths. He thinks he has understood - but he has understood nothing...
In a novel between detective fiction and spiritual adventure, between the lyricism of style and the discomfort caused by the investigations, Bernanos does not allow the reader to breathe until the last page. The solution to the mystery could be considered scandalous for the time the novel was written.