Reply #1: I used to consider "The Trial" a form of dark humor.

[Jim__]

It doesn't seem at all humorous anymore.

One off topic note on the review. It states:

The court document that led to his arrest claimed Spanish investigators had turned up a fingerprint that matched Mayfield's with "100 percent certainty." It later emerged that Spanish authorities always doubted that assessment and were inclined to link the print to someone else.

100% certainty is absolute bullshit. No one has any idea how accurate finger printing is; but it certainly is not 100% accurate. There is a long article from the Skeptical Inquirer (Aug 2007) on this. A brief excerpt:

Perhaps the earliest argument mounted in defense of fingerprinting was "the fingerprint examiner's fallacy" (Cole 2004). Fingerprint proponents reasoned that if all human fingerprint patterns are unique (itself no more than an assumption, though a plausible one), fingerprint identification must be 100 percent accurate. The fallacy is seductive: although it might be argued that at least one thinker recognized the fallacy early on (Faulds 1905), it took nearly a century before even sophisticated minds were able to shake free of it (Stoney 1997; Woodworth 1997). Nonetheless, once considered carefully, the flaw in reasoning is obvious. One cannot infer the reliability of a source-attribution technique solely from the rarity of the target object.