The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum : Or How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

From review - One of the things about the European avant-garde literature movement in the middle of the last century that was most influential was the inversion technique. Most commonly used with mysteries, the authors would expose pieces of the mystery commonly left until the end of most novels, and then extract the mystery itself from things normally given early on in the story. Heinrich Bll was one of the best at this game, and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is his best-known work of this sort.