Polish State Prosecutor Szacki Investigates
2 total works
The morning after a gruelling psychotherapy session in a Warsaw monastery, Henryk Telak is found dead, a roasting spit stuck in one eye. The case lands on the desk of State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki. World-weary, suffering from bureaucratic exhaustion and marital ennui, Szacki feels that life has passed him by, but this case changes everything. He must steer his way among a gallery of colourful characters: a flirtatious young journalist, an eccentric psychiatrist, a lecherous police colleague and a paranoid historian. Szacki's search for the killer unearths another murder that took place twenty years earlier, before the fall of Communism. The trail leads to facts that, for his own safety, he'd be better off not knowing.
It is spring 2009, and prosecutor Szacki is no longer working in Warsaw - he has said goodbye to his family and to his career in the capital and moved to Sandomierz, a picturesque town full of churches and museums. Hoping to start a "brave new life", Szacki instead finds himself investigating a strange murder case in surroundings both alien and unfriendly. The victim is found brutally murdered, her body drained of blood. The killing bears the hallmarks of legendary Jewish ritual slaughter, prompting a wave of anti-Semitic paranoia in the town, where everyone knows everyone. The murdered woman's husband is bereft, but when Szacki discovers that she had a lover, the husband becomes the prime suspect. Before there's time to arrest him, he is found murdered in similar circumstances. In his investigation Szacki must wrestle with the painful tangle of Polish-Jewish relations and something that happened more than sixty years earlier.