Cruvellier is a journalist specializing in crimes against humanity and international criminal courts. This book, self-consciously modeled after Eichmann in Jerusalem, follows the 2007 trial of Duch / Kaing Guek Eav, the commander of the notorious S-21 prison. S-21 was one of over 150 facilities established by the Khmer Rogue for the torture and execution of internal enemies. As commander, Duch oversaw the deaths of an estimated 20,000 people. The killing was meticulously organized and recorded, with an extensive archive of files containing photographs, biographies, and confessions of the doomed.

Revolutions invariably wind up eating their own, starting with Robespierre being lead to the guillotine, continuing through the 20th century, and culminating in the extraordinary bloodshed of the Cambodia genocide, which killed between 21 and 25% of Cambodia's population. S-21 was a central node in the machinery of death, where high ranking cadres were dispatched when they had run afoul on an internal power struggle. Pol Pot's paranoia was infinite. A single accusation would bring down subordinates, wives, children, in an ever-expanding web of death.

Two questions weave through the book. The first is about what type of man Duch must be, to commit such crimes? Eichmann was a bureaucratic nonentity, but Duch is somehow worse. Both before and after the revolution, he was a teacher, beloved by his students and peers as kind, reliable, and intelligent. Yet for a decade, he was an enthusiastic member of an apparatus of death, devoted to 'smashing' (the literal meaning Cambodian word used for execution) the enemies of the revolution. He handwriting is all over the archives, demanding more torture, proscribing executions, listing more victims to bring in.

The second is what manner of justice is possible, or even appropriate. The dead can never be brought back. The survivors will carry their wounds with them for a lifetime. I'm not even sure what manner of healing is possible for Cambodia, and neither is Cruvellier. the trial becomes a psychodrama, a grueling struggle which Duch initially controls, and then which takes its own momentum and breaks him. He acknowledges responsibility, but cannot find forgiveness. There are parallels between the obedience to authority which lead to Duch's crimes, and the obedience to authority on which the court runs. In the end a confession, whether extracted by torture or in a court of human rights, is a coercive bargain struck between those with power, and those at the mercy of power. Beneath the pomp and bureaucratic starch of the ICC is the mob, howling for blood.