Fabulous Fiction Firsts #368

Fri, 11/30/2012 - 5:22pm by muffy

Death in Breslau * * introduces to US readers Marek Krajewski, an award-winning Polish crime writer and linguist, and at the same time, the first of a stylish and moody historic detective series featuring Inspector Eberhard Mock.

Breslau (present-day Wroclaw),1933. The city is in the grip of the Gestapo. Two young women are found murdered on a train, scorpions writhing on their bodies, and a bloody indecipherable note on the wall. Police Inspector Eberhard Mock is roused from his weekly assignation at a house of ill-repute to investigate. The urgency is heightened as one of the victim is the daughter of a powerful Breslau baron.

As Mock and his young troubled assistant Herbert Anwaldt plunge into the city's squalid underbelly for clues, the case takes on a dark twist of the occult when the mysterious note indicates a ritual killing with roots in the Crusades.

"Mock is a compelling protagonist, part Hercule Poirot and part thug, who uses blackmail as a standard investigative tool. He also has a weakness for nubile young Jewish women and chess-playing prostitutes. Krajewski's characterization of the prewar Nazis as a murderous lot who spend most of their time scheming against each other and indulging their various libidinous kinks is intriguing, but what makes this novel a stunner is the detailed portrait of Breslau in the otherworldly, uberdecadent, interwar years."

"(I)ntelligent, atmospheric... with a distinctly European, Kafkaesque sensibility", it will appeal to international and historic crime fiction fans, especially those who follow the Bernie Gunther series by Philip Kerr; and the The Liebermann Papers series by Frank Tallis, set in Freud's dangerous, dazzling Vienna.

* * = starred reviews