KAROLINA AND THE TORN CURTAIN

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 Jednoróg 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 José 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 Rózana Street brothel run by Madame Olesia Dunin. Following this clue leads Zofia to focus her investigation on a trafficking ring whose boundaries far exceed Rózana Street, Cracow, and Poland. Pseudonymous partners Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczyński bring both the do-gooders and the criminals of fin-de-siècle 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.