Blood Enemy
The concluding volume of Douglas Jackson’s Warsaw Quartet opens in June 1944. For almost five years, Polish police inspector Jan Kalisz has maintained a perilous double life, ostensibly serving in the German-controlled criminal police while secretly working for the Polish resistance. When a Wehrmacht war-crimes investigator and his escort are murdered, suspicion naturally falls upon the resistance, but Kalisz believes the truth is more complicated. His investigation takes him from occupied Warsaw to bomb-damaged Berlin and eventually Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he encounters Josef Mengele. By the time he returns to Warsaw, the city is approaching the uprising of August 1944, and the double existence he has sustained since the German invasion is becoming increasingly impossible.
The novel is thoroughly researched, yet the historical detail rarely feels intrusive. Political and military events provide the framework, while the realities of occupation—fear, hunger, violence, divided loyalties and the compromises necessary for survival—give the story its texture. Jackson’s prose is direct, vigorous and highly accessible, particularly effective in scenes of action and menace. The violence can be extremely graphic but rarely seems gratuitous given the extraordinary brutality of occupied Poland.
Most importantly, Kalisz is an effective creation: an essentially decent man forced continually to decide how far apparent collaboration can be justified in resisting a profoundly evil regime. Occasionally, his proximity to major historical events and figures strains probability; in Blood Enemy especially, there is a risk of making one fictional policeman rather too conveniently ubiquitous. Jackson, however, generally integrates fact and thriller plotting with considerable skill. The result is intelligent, compelling historical fiction, with a convincing sense of time and place.
