This book provides a comprehensive look at the obsessive theme of crime, which is most evident in the context of dysfunctional family relationships, in Guy de Maupassant’s nearly 300 short works. A study of the narrative structures points to the presence of a jury-like atmosphere throughout, highlights an inherent thematic unity in a fragmentary genre, and details an artistics sophistication on the part of an author whose works have only recently begun to receive this type of critical re-examination in the scholarship of nineteenth-century French literature.