The Brothers Karamazov was Fyodor Dostoevsky's last novel. He finished it in 1880, dedicated it to his wife, and died four months later. The book is, among other things, an enormous argument he wanted to leave behind.
"Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death..."
The first sentence tells you the father is dead. The entire novel is the retrospective story of how he came to be killed — and, more importantly, which of his sons is morally responsible. Dostoevsky turns a murder mystery into a treatise on freedom, faith, and inheritance.