Hammer blow

This chronicle of a murder foretold is not only a page-turner, the story also sticks in your mind from the first page because it seems to be true. The main character is a twelve-year-old boy who can no longer tolerate his father's iron fisted domination of the family and who takes his mother's statement - that they will only have peace when their father is in his grave - literally. At the free school, where his mother sends him in the hope that he will become a better person than his father, he becomes involved in a power struggle among the pupils and finds inspiration for his fatal plan there.

Is a twelve-year-old boy responsible for his actions, what part does the community play in a family drama and to what extent are parents who imbue their children with extreme ideologies to blame? Bart Van Lierde raises these confrontational questions through the rawness of his story and keeps the reader in suspense by only revealing at the end who was actually murdered.