Zonde in het deftige dorp

In the respectable village of Defteling, no one sins out loud. That is, until the rector's household explodes with scandal. Doctor Stork, whose surgery sits at the village's social crossroads, watches with keen medical interest as the town's leading citizens manage their moral outrage. The sin itself matters less than what it reveals: the desperate calculations of the respectable, the whispered deals, the convenient forgetting. De Meester dissects a community that prizes its own goodness above actual virtue, where churchgoers instrumentalize righteousness and neighbors become accomplices to each other's performance. Written with dry wit and psychological precision, this is a novel about the small cruelties of provincial life, the theater of respectability, and the uncomfortable truth that those who pronounce loudest on sin often have the most to hide.