Blood Roses (The Warsaw Quartet, 1)
Warsaw, September 1939. Police Inspector and army reservist Jan Kalisz is wounded in defending his country, Poland, against the Blitzkrieg invasion by Germany. As a German speaker, he is recruited by the underground Polish resistance to continue his work as a police official in Warsaw and secretly report back on the occupiers. It is a role filled with constant danger, as he has to appear compliant with his German controllers whose brutality towards the Polish population is shocking, while simultaneously controlling the stresses of the double game he plays and the constant jeopardy from amongst his own people, including his wife, by seeming to be collaborating with the Germans.
In a parallel story, a particularly sadistic serial killer who preys on young, vulnerable women joins the SS and is transferred to Warsaw, giving him an excellent opportunity to continue and expand his horrific killings. The man does not just kill his victims – he then makes some form of horrific art work from their organs and entrails he extracts from their bodies. The two elements of the story join, and when the daughter of a prominent German is brutally murdered by the serial killer, Kalisz is under huge pressure to find the culprit.
Douglas Jackson is known mostly for his popular Hero of Rome series set in Classical Rome. This is an excellently researched, plotted and presented novel. The historical context is superb and thoroughly accurate. It is the first of a planned quartet that chronicle Jan Kalisz’s double life of resistance and criminal police officer under the German yoke during the most evil of occupations.
