... dark – and darkly humorous – European crime fiction at its best... (Reader Dad Blog)
Rage is a book by Poland’s number one crime writer, Zygmunt Miłoszewski, which has been released just yesterday in English. It became one of the bestselling books in
Polish literary history when it came out last year.
Zygmunt Miłoszewski is the biggest name in
Polish crime fiction, his addictive, gritty novels have been compared to the
Scandinavian crime masters. The first two novels Prosecutor Szacki series (A
Gain of Truth and Entanglement) have been made into films and
BBC Radio 4 are currently in the process of dramatizing Grain of Truth for
radio. His books have been translated into over 13 different languages.
Here’s a special excerpt for you,
readers of FLY HIGH!
Chapter Two
For a while Szacki was lost. He
remembered Olsztyn’s Warszawska Avenue as a wide road leading out of town past
the university, but it turned out to have an uglier sister—a short extension
lined with scruffy little tenements right next to the Old Town. He had to turn
left by Jan’s Bridge. The hospital was located opposite something that called
itself the “regional beer center.”
He showed the guard his ID and found a
parking spot between the buildings. This had once been the German garrison
hospital, probably of lesser importance, as the buildings of immortal red brick
looked much smaller and more modest than the neo-Gothic blocks of the city
hospital. Part of it looked neglected, and part had been renovated, with a
modern interior that was nicely integrated with the German architecture. The
place had the atmosphere of a building site, arising from the fact that
Olsztyn’s university medical faculty had only been up and running for a few
years. In a short time a squalid military hospital had been transformed into a
clinical marvel. Szacki had been to see Żenia’s mother here last year and had
realized that on the whole it had quite a human dimension, compared with the
various medical monstrosities he had seen in his career. That had been during a
hot spring, when the chestnut trees were flowering among the buildings, and the
old brick walls exuded a pleasant chill.
