Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky

What drives people to commit murder? Love, hate, desperation, or even necessity can motivate this crime. In Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, the motivation for the crime comes from a force more compelling than all of these, an idea. The character, Raskolnikov, decides to commit homicide to obtain money for his sister and prove his theories on life. A deadly, psychological game of cat and mouse ensues between Raskolnikov and the authorities. Within this game, Raskolnikov’s guilty conscious may prove his greatest adversary. Shocking, thought-provoking, and surprisingly sentimental, this novel continues to have prominent influence on literary history.