Luke Karamazov

Was it because they were subconsciously trying to kill the drunken, violent man that was their father that brothers Luke Karamazov and Tommy Searl from Kalamazoo became serial murderers?

Addressing this and other questions, author Conrad Hilberry presents an unusually vivid and detailed portrait of two contrasting psychological types in this account. In 1964, Luke confessed to a five-week murder spree in which he killed five men. Tommy was convicted of the rape and murder of four women in 1972.

Hilberry investigates the relationship between the brothers, as well as their feelings about their parents, about the prison staff, and about the woman who has been married to each of them. With the drama of fiction, the resulting story is bizarre, somewhat grisly, but always psychologically revealing.

Conrad Hilberry is professor of English at Kalamazoo College. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. As a poet he has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 1984 artists award from the Michigan Foundation for the Arts. His latest book of poems The Moon Seen as a Slice of Pineapple, was published in 1984 by the University of Georgia Press. He is one of the editors of The Third Coast, an anthology of Michigan poetry, published in 1976 by the Wayne State University Press.