Karolina and the Torn Curtain

March 15, 2021
Murder strikes much too close to home for sleuthing socialite Zofia Turbotyńska. Called to the beach below the Rożnowski Villa one April morning in 1895, Cracow police commissioner Stanislaw Jednor�g finds the body of a young woman who's been stabbed to death. The victim is Karolina Szulc, Zofia's virginal 17-year-old housemaid, who abruptly quit the day before to leave town in the company of the man who'd swept her off her feet even though she already had another suitor. Angry and sad, Zofia presses her cook, Franciszka Gawęda, to dig up evidence of the new sweetheart's name, and Franciszka obliges by finding a business card that identifies him as engineer Marceli Bzowski. When Zofia, already shaken by the suicide of Brazilian Jos� Silva the morning after Karolina's death, confronts Bzowski in the full fury of her righteousness, the engineer, who's married, swears that he wasn't the man in question; an entire case of his business cards must have been stolen during his last trip to the R�zana Street brothel run by Madame Olesia Dunin. Following this clue leads Zofia to focus her investigation on a trafficking ring whose boundaries far exceed R�zana Street, Cracow, and Poland. Pseudonymous partners Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczyński bring both the do-gooders and the criminals of fin-de-si�cle Cracow to entertaining life, but their deepest interest is in the unlikely detective lurking beneath "the sedate Mrs. Jekyll": "the hidden Mrs. Hyde, the fearless stalker of criminals." A gravely decorous period piece that vividly evokes its moment while maintaining an archly amused distance from it.

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March 15, 2021
Nineteenth-century Cracow socialite Zofia Turbotynska becomes involved when her former housemaid Karolina is found on a bank of the Vistula River, violated and murdered. Karolina had recently left her job to be married. Zofia and her cook, Franciszka, provide information that seems to lead to Karolina's killer, and the case is closed with the assumed murderer's death. But is he really dead? Franciszka and Zofia aren't sure and persuade Magistrate Klossowitz to reopen the case, with Zofia performing the bulk of the investigating. Zofia finds herself out of her comfort zone, interviewing socialists and delving into the horrifying world of gangsters, prostitution, and sex trafficking, though none of that stops her from eventually connecting the many pieces of the puzzle. Vividly steeped in the politics and the life and times of 1895 Cracow, this mystery, with its charming heroine and dry humor, will appeal to fans of Anne Perry's Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series, which also weaves the social issues of the day into the story.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.