Pairing Karsten Dusse’s hit satiric thriller “Murder Mindfully” with Shaun Ossei-Owusu’s “Law on Trial” for a double feature on what the legal profession does to the soul.
Murder Mindfully by Karsten Dusse, translated from the German by Florian Duijsens. (Soho Crime, 400 pages); Law on Trial: An Unlikely Insider Reckons with Our Legal System by Shaun Ossei-Owusu. (W.R. Norton, 432 pages)
Breathe in. Bill hours. Bury the evidence.
That is, more or less, the operating manual of Murder Mindfully, Karsten Dusse’s German satiric thriller about a defense attorney named Björn Diemel who discovers that mindfulness coaching is surprisingly adaptable to both his practice and his life of escalating crime.
It is also, Shaun Ossei-Owusu argues in Law on Trial, a fairly accurate description of how the legal profession operates. The profession often buries its moral underpinnings and remains indifferent to the means as long as the client prevails. The two books are exceptional in their own lanes, offering a double feature on the legal soul through vastly different lenses.
If Law on Trial is the indictment, Murder Mindfully is Exhibit A. Ossei-Owusu builds the case for why the legal system fails the ideals it claims to serve. Dusse gives us a lawyer who has stopped pretending he had any. One is rigorous scholarship; the other is mindfulness with a body count. They both arrive the same day, April 14, which is either a coincidence or a verdict.
Two Books, One Verdict
“Why does a legal system that purports to represent ideals like justice, equality, and fairness consistently fail to meet these ideals?” That question, posed early in Law on Trial, is Ossei-Owusu’s engine. He finds the answer in what he calls structural tension. He explains that lawyers sometimes act as if they are engaged in a perpetual tug-of-war, acting as “guardians of justice at one moment and its pallbearers the next.”
Karsten Dusse’s Murder Mindfully takes that tension and follows it to an insane yet logical conclusion. He imagines what happens when a lawyer decides that his only duty is to his own inner peace, regardless of the carnage required to achieve it.
It is this pitch-black irony that propelled Murder Mindfully to become a massive international bestseller. The premise is so cinematic that it has already been adapted into a hit Netflix series, with the next book in the series (the brilliantly titled My Inner Child Wants to Kill) due August 4, for those like me who want to follow Björn deeper into the void.
Both authors know the system from the inside out. Ossei-Owusu is a Bronx native and an Ivy League law professor who has spent his career dissecting the history and ethical failings of the American legal system. Dusse has done his time in the trenches, having worked at a law firm as a practicing attorney before moving into writing and television, and that experience shows on every page.
Where Ossei-Owusu provides the structural autopsy of the profession, Dusse provides the lived experience of the burnout. Ossei-Owusu identifies legal education as the initial culprit in lawyers coming to think about law as an entity unmoored from justice. Students are taught to strip legal questions of their moral weight; academic conditioning can quietly replace the idealism that brought people to law school with fluency in procedure.
The result is graduates who are technically capable but increasingly distant from the real consequences of their work. They come to see the cruelties of the criminal justice system as puzzles rather than wrongs. The examples are concrete and at times startling, such as lawyers providing legal cover for immigration officers detaining American citizens.
The guardians becoming pallbearers, one procedure at a time.
The Art of the Mindful Mob Lawyer
There is a line early in Murder Mindfully that Ossei-Owusu could have used as an epigraph:
“If I’d retained the ideals I had as a law student, I’d have found it completely justified for such an utter lowlife to remain in pre-trial detention until the court hearing and then be tossed in the slammer for a few years. With my years of experience as a criminal defense lawyer who specialized in utter lowlifes, however, I managed to free the idiot in under two hours.”
Oh, this book is funny. Credit where it’s due: Florian Duijsens’s translation is seamless. The dry, precise tone that makes Björn’s narration so deadpan carries perfectly into English. Björn is cynical, competent, and clear-eyed about the distance between who he meant to be and who he became.
The book captures absurd details about law firm life: client wrangling, compensation politics, and the specific indignities of billing hours for people you cannot stand. I laughed out loud at the vignette of Clara Kerner, a trainee Björn encounters on a Saturday at the firm. She has no real business being there except to accumulate goodwill with the partners. He finds her working through decisions of the Federal Court of Justice:
“She had photocopied some decisions and marked up the bits she considered important with different highlighters. However, since she was overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of potentially important things, she seemed to simply be highlighting everything.”
While Clara is clearly not cut out to be a lawyer, her actions are relatable. I highlighted so much of the book’s self-help sections that my own annotations became meaningless.
The Joke Is That It Works
The story really kicks into gear when Björn’s personal life hits a breaking point. His ex-wife-to-be, Katharina, is losing patience. He’s anxious, absent, and checked out from their life together and from their toddler daughter, Emily. At Katharina’s urging, he starts seeing Joschka Breitner, a mindfulness coach. Breitner uses the teachings of Epictetus, the ancient Stoic philosopher who taught that we cannot control external events, only our reactions to them. Björn approaches these techniques with professional skepticism and then, to his own surprise, begins to absorb them.
In his acknowledgments, Dusse makes it clear that this isn’t just a parody. He writes:
“Any generous reader will notice that (despite all the funny business) mindfulness really is important to me.”
He means it. Each chapter opens with genuine guidance framed by whatever Björn is about to do. Björn then takes that earnest advice and applies it to the most horrific circumstances imaginable. The joke is not that mindfulness is foolish. The joke is that it functions. Björn absorbs it sincerely and applies it to situations its designers did not anticipate. It begs the question of whether the goal of a lawyer is to become so zen that they are no longer disturbed by criminal and unethical actions.
The Client from Hell, Escalated
Björn needs a lot of deep breathing because his only client is Dragan Sergowicz. Dragan runs a criminal operation and is the specific kind of client whose problems migrate. He starts encroaching on Björn’s personal life. A father-daughter weekend with Emily goes badly. Then Dragan vanishes, and Björn finds himself running the gang as a proxy.
Anyone who has represented a difficult client will recognize the early Dragan scenes. The man generates problems faster than Björn can contain them. He mistakes legal representation for personal loyalty. At one point, Dragan hands Björn a phone showing a high-definition news clip of Dragan himself beating a man who is on fire with an iron bar. He presents it as if it were relevant case material. Björn tries to breathe through what he is seeing.
What Dusse does is follow that dynamic to its logical extreme. Björn is stuck. There is no exit as far as the client is concerned. And so Björn applies the only tools available: the mindfulness techniques he absorbed trying to save his marriage and the professional ethics he abandoned trying to make partner. Neither set was designed for this, but both turn out to be adaptable.
The book’s central joke is that the mindfulness actually works. Breitner’s Epictetan reframe is played for laughs, but Dusse never disowns it. Here it is in action as Björn processes the burning-man video:
“What causes us to worry is not whatever may have happened. It is only after we classify what happened that it frightens us. No single event is good or bad in itself.”
Björn applies this. It helps. The situation it helps him through is simply not one the self-help industry had in mind.
This total commitment to the bit is what makes the book so unsettling. Dusse doesn’t just mock the legal system; he uses its own logic to justify the unthinkable. The close of the book is where Dusse earns the legal premise fully:
“As a criminal defense lawyer, you don’t have to stick to the truth. You just have to sow doubt. I’ve always been quite good at that.”
This is accurate. It is also the line that brings Ossei-Owusu back into the room. What both books are really describing is the professional management of doubt: about the system, about clients, and about oneself. Ossei-Owusu traces how that management becomes structural and how the guardians learn to live with being pallbearers. Dusse shows what it looks like from inside one person’s skull. With the breathing exercises and the bodies all requiring the same basic skill, Björn masters the ability to reclassify what happened until it no longer frightens him.
Law on Trial is rigorous and necessary. Murder Mindfully is one of the funniest books I’ve read in years. Ossei-Owusu asks and answers how lawyers become pallbearers. Dusse shows you how breathing mindfully can help you navigate the most extreme client wrangling situation, one step at a time.
Fine print: My thanks to W. W. Norton & Company and Soho Crime and for the advanced copies of these titles. I received a digital ARC of Law on Trial via NetGalley and a physical galley of Murder Mindfully.
Murder Mindfully by Karsten Dusse, translated from the German by Florian Duijsens. (Soho Crime, 400 pages); Law on Trial by Shaun Ossei-Owusu. (W.R. Norton, 432 pages)