A Grain of Truth

Starred review from November 19, 2012
A smart plot, an engagingly acerbic lead, and a nuanced portrayal of 2009 Poland lift Miloszewski’s second mystery featuring Warsaw prosecutor Teodor Szacki (after 2010’s Entanglement). After breaking up a human-trafficking ring in the provincial city of Sandomierz, Szacki decides to move there to begin his life anew, though he’s soon disillusioned (“he had thrown the life he had spent years building down the toilet in exchange for a sodding pipe dream, and now he was left with nothing”). When someone repeatedly slashes the throat of Elzbieta Budnik and leaves her nude corpse on display in a ravine below Sandomierz’s medieval walls, Szacki welcomes the chance to look into a serious crime. Discovery that the murder weapon was a knife used by Jewish butchers leads to speculation that Budnik was killed as a ritual sacrifice. More deaths follow, building up to an ingenious fair-play solution that matches the clever depiction of the protagonist’s midlife crisis.

December 1, 2012
A Polish prosecutor's ill-advised decision to move from Warsaw to the provinces cuts down on his case load but not on the angst his first big opportunity brings Barbara "Basia" Sobieraj thinks the case never should have gone to Teodor Szacki in the first place. After all, he's an outsider, a very recent arrival to Sandomierz from Warsaw (Entanglement, 2010), whereas she's known the Budniks for years. When Elzbieta Budnik's naked corpse is found outside the old synagogue that now serves as the town archive, her throat savagely slashed, Basia feels a much closer attachment to both the victim and her husband, Grzegorz, than Szacki ever could. But that's just the problem, her maternal boss Maria Miszczyk tells her: The mystery of who killed an English teacher of whom no one speaks a word of ill needs an objective eye. For better or worse, though, Szacki is hardly objective. Having rashly decided to abandon his wife and daughter in Warsaw so that he can take up a new life in this charming backwater, he's thrown himself into a series a meaningless affairs and a depression so deep that he welcomes the Budnik murder. Slowly but inevitably, complications darken his view. Wealthy businessman Jerzy Szyller disappears shortly after he confesses his involvement with the victim. Grzegorz Budnik, the only plausible suspect, instead follows his wife in death. And everything about both murders, carried out in a way ghoulishly appropriate for the Jewish slaughter of kosher animals, seems to link them to evils with much deeper roots--evils that pose special obstacles to an outsider like Szacki. Leisurely, ruminative and tangled--more successful as a portrait of the complex, self-hating, yet oddly likable detective than of the crimes he's called to investigate.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2013
Polish mystery writer Miloszewski's first novel, Entanglement (2010), earned the High Calibre Award and was made into a movie. This second in the series finds state prosecutor Teodor Szacki tackling anti-Semitism in Poland. Szacki has left Warsaw after ending his marriage and settled in Sandomierz, a picturesque town with beautiful churches and museums. As an outsider, he is not welcomed by the residents. When a woman is found dead with her body completely drained of blood, Szacki investigates, despite the lack of cooperation from the local police. The killing looks like ritual slaughter, and it triggers anti-Semitic paranoia in the close-knit community. Szacki must face the painful history of Polish-Jewish relations and the aftermath of an event that occurred 60 years earlier. Miloszewski's compelling mystery offers a revealing glimpse of life in modern Poland, a country still dealing with its complicated past.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)