Steel and Shadow: The Dnipropetrovsk Murders and the Dawn of Digital Nihilism, (Paperback)

<p><strong>Steel and Shadow: The Dnipropetrovsk Murders and the Dawn of Digital Nihilism</strong></p><p>In the summer of 2007, three teenagers from the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk committed twenty-one murders in three weeks, targeting the elderly, the vulnerable, and children with a carpenter's hammer carried in a yellow plastic bag. They filmed their crimes. One video, the killing of forty-eight-year-old cancer survivor Sergei Yatzenko, circulated globally and continues to circulate today, making the case one of the most disturbing criminal episodes of the digital age.</p><p><em>Steel and Shadow</em> is not simply a true crime account of what happened. It is a forensic examination of why it happened, tracing the psychological development of the perpetrators through the institutional wreckage of post-Soviet Ukraine, analysing the role of internet gore culture and deliberate desensitisation in dismantling normal human inhibition, and centring, always, the twenty-one lives that the summer consumed.</p><p>Drawing on criminological research, social psychology, and the detailed record of the investigation and trial, Irish crime writer Liam Lomasney constructs a meticulous, morally serious account of a case that forced criminologists to propose an entirely new typology of serial violence: the digital nihilist killer, whose primary motive is not sex, money, or politics, but the creation of a permanent violent legacy in the only medium that guarantees permanence, the internet.</p><p><br> </p>

• Steel and Shadow: The Dnipropetrovsk Murders and the Dawn of Digital Nihilism, (Paperback)
• Author: Silverback Books
• ISBN: 9798233976322
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2026-03-05
• Page Count: 200