Blood Sacrifice

Douglas Jackson

(Canelo, £16.99)

A prolific author of historical and crime fiction, Stirling-based Douglas Jackson produced the nine-volume Hero of Rome epic, which drew to a close in 2018. Comprising a more modest four books, his Warsaw Quartet may be shorter and narrower in scope, but it bears the same hallmarks of extensive research, atmosphere and slow-burning tension.

And there really is no let up of tension in Blood Sacrifice, the second book of the quartet, nor any place for light relief. The premise just doesn’t allow for it. The series takes place during the Second World War after Poland has been occupied by Nazi Germany.

As established in its predecessor, Blood Roses, bilingual Polish police inspector Jan Kalisz has been recruited by the Resistance as their man inside the Nazi-run police force. Liaising only with the agent known as Kazimierz, he passes information to the Resistance and carries out delicate tasks on their behalf.

To his fellow Poles, Kalisz is a treacherous collaborator and the best he can expect from his German colleagues is grudging, wary acceptance. The slightest drop of his guard could betray his secret allegiances, leading to torture and death.

A short distance across this oppressed, war-torn city, behind a three-metre wall, is the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, from which interned Jews are being herded into trains and transported to concentration camps. Those who remain are starving, resigned to their fate and preparing to make a final stand. The mood of bleakness and desperation is omnipresent and inescapable.

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Kalisz’s latest case is the death of Axel Weiss, a talented accountant who was invited to join the Gestapo to root out fraud in the Third Reich. Immediately seeing through his murderers’ attempts to make it look like suicide, Kalisz investigates Weiss’s background and finds that he had two other identities. Some knew him as August Winter, a businessman trying to muscle his way into Warsaw’s black market, but the detective also finds papers identifying him as Adam Weizmann, a Jew living in a house full of antiques in the Warsaw Ghetto.

It’s actually quite convenient for Kalisz that his investigation takes him into the heavily-guarded ghetto, as it’s a way for him to maintain contact with a former gangster turned freedom fighter who has been pleading with him to use his influence in the Resistance to smuggle them in weapons.

A sub-plot involving ghetto children being stalked by a prowler they call “The Cannibal” has rather less mileage than Jackson’s depiction of the indomitable spirit and doomed heroism of the ghetto’s last survivors, who know their days are numbered and want guns so that at least they can be remembered for putting up a fight when the end came.

By thriller standards, the skilfully-written Blood Sacrifice paces itself fairly slowly, but it’s infused with dread and the stark clarity of a life that requires perpetual vigilance, in which the humdrum matters of day-to-day existence are relegated to background noise while anyone who might represent a potential threat or a potential ally snaps into sharp focus. Even Kalisz’s wife and child come across less vividly than players like his suspicious colleague Hofle or the profiteering ghetto supremo Obersturmfuhrer Konrad, with his warehouses full of plundered Jewish possessions.

Even at this stage in the game, anyone looking closely enough at Kalisz’s record will find enough questionable coincidences and fishy deaths to conclude that he’s not all he purports to be. With the tension bound to escalate further, and a sense of inevitable disaster in the air, everything points to the Warsaw Quartet reaching an explosive conclusion.