Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)

An axe, an old pawnbroker, a theory that some men are permitted to kill. Raskolnikov, a starving ex-student in a St. Petersburg July so hot the city itself seems delirious, talks himself into the murder to prove he is one of the extraordinary few who stand above the moral law. Then he discovers what no theory accounted for: that the mind keeps its own ledger, and a conscience cannot be reasoned out of existence. What follows is less a chase than a slow tightening, Raskolnikov circling the truth, the detective Porfiry circling him, until the only relief left is to be caught. Dostoevsky writes fever from the inside, the swarming streets and the cold sweat and the half-mad logic that feels, line by line, exactly like your own worst three a.m. And then, impossibly, he offers a way back, through the love of a woman who has nothing and forgives everything.