A perceptively sensitive and ingenious work, Violent Cases, reveals the often murky nexus between memory and imagination through the narrator's cloudy childhood remembrance of a visit to Al Capone's osteopath and the impact of seedy stories on impressionable youth. Gradually, the England of the 1960s and the Chicago of the 1920s begin to merge into a beautifully drawn and hauntingly written tale of memory and evil.