Unspeakable Crimes

A Mom and Her Blog, who has a righteous passion for justice when it comes to children, has a story about an important conviction of a child murderer.

This is the kind of event that sets us all back on our heels: we find ourselves desperate for justice in cases like this, and become convinced that if we don't get it, we'll never eat or sleep again.

The hardest thing I do, as a crime writer, is reading accounts of the evil that men and women do—especially those that steal people's lives. Especially those that steal children's innocence.

But I don't let myself cry about it. I cry about war, but I don't cry about crime.

In the case of war, I don't feel qualified to do anything concrete about it (except to publicize that it's going on, and that we have a lot at stake).

In the case of crime, I have the power to raise public awareness on a more concrete level, and to underscore—in every piece of extended fiction I write—that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that the former is worth fighting for.

Many assume that people like me are merely making idle puzzles out of people's grief. Not so. We are reminding people what the face of evil looks like when it's still on a human scale—in Stalin's terms, not statistics yet, but only tragedy—and underscoring what our warriors fight for overseas: a society in which those who lose their children get to face the murderers in court, and see justice done.

It's not satisfactory in the least, but it's critically important.

Go read the post. Share my disdain for the cultists that surround every successful killer. And hook up with civilization.