On Friday November 13, 2015, a series of coordinated terror attacks throughout Paris killed 130 people, most of them young people attending a rock concert. All but one of the perpetrators made use of explosive vests, putting them outside the reach of the justice system. The attacks themselves were largely bumbled: what could have been a mass slaughter at a stadium was foiled when the terrorists arrived late, and couldn’t get in. Another just walked off without hurting anyone, dumping his vest in a trash can.

When the case went to trial, French writer and critic Emmanuel Carrère spent five days a week for ten months sitting in a room that he repeatedly likens to a church, writing weekly columns that appeared in newspapers throughout Europe before they were assembled into V13: Chronicle of a Trial. Even when little was happening at the trial, he still had to fill the space [in the daily print paper game, we called this the newshole—EB], leading to reporting on diversions around the courthouse, including an unexpected cameo from Carlos the Jackal, pointlessly appealing one of his several overlapping sentences.