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Captain Eberhard Mock, transferred to the Abwehr in Breslau, Germany, is dragged away from 1937 New Year celebrations by the discovery of the body of a young woman gnawed, raped, and strangled. His investigations show the girl came by train from Lwow in Poland in the company of a man in drag. The Polish police agree to assist - they too have had similar cases - and Commissioner Edward Popielski is assigned as the lead officer. Mock and Popielski find they have much in common and find it no strain to delve into the underworld to find the culprit, although Popielski is distracted by concerns about his daughter, who shows signs of rebellion. As it turns out, his worries are fully justified. This is the fourth book featuring Mock, who, despite being over fifty, is still drinking, eating and womanising as much as he was twenty years ago. He transferred to the Abwehr in 1934 from the police, who were being filled with Gestapo 'like syphilitic pathogens' and expelling professionally competent colleagues just because they were Jews. Why he thought military intelligence would be any different is not clear. In any event, his current assignment is pretty much a police operation. That much of his 'investigating' has to be conducted in brothels is a happy conjunction of professional and personal enthusiasms. The wealth of period detail is, as ever, a particular feature of Krajewski's detective series. It is so complete as to present a rounded picture of life at the time, from the stuffy drawing-rooms of the respectable to the disgusting hovels of the poor, not omitting the widespread debauchery. The previous book in the series, PHANTOMS OF BRESLAU, was set in 1919 and the strain of the Great War on Germany was palpable. In THE MINOTAUR'S HEAD the decadence of pre-WWII Europe underlies the action. We hear little of Nazi provocations or of strains between Germany and Poland, but it is difficult to resist the hindsight that within a very short time, much of what is depicted will be swept away. § Chris Roberts is a retired manager of shopping centres in Hong Kong, and now lives in Bristol, primarily reading.
Reviewed by Chris Roberts, September 2012
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