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Psychotherapy sessions have a reputation for sometimes being emotionally intense. But following a difficult and painful session at a Warsaw monastery one participant, Henryk Telak, is found murdered with a roasting spit stuck in one eye. State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki is called in to assess the case with some expectation that it will join the many other unsolved crimes that pass through his hands. Although only in his thirties Szacki is already world-weary, white haired and wondering if life has passed him by. With a respectable job, a wife and daughter, Szacki seems to have it all but to the State Prosecutor the future seems strangely biscuit coloured. His yearning for excitement appears to be answered when he begins an affair with a young journalist called Monika. When the case of the murder of Henryk Telak proves resistant to enquiries Szacki digs deeper. However, he uncovers a chain of events that have their origins in Soviet era Poland and finds himself face to face with a formidable and implacable enemy.

Entanglement is an interesting and unusual crime thriller with the world of psychotherapy forming the backdrop to its central events. The city of Warsaw is vividly evoked, a city whose dramatic and sometimes harrowing past often impinges on its present. The jaded central character of Teodor Szacki is idiosyncratic and well drawn, living on a diet of coffee, cigarettes and hard-boiled eggs in tartare sauce, apparently a cult item on the menu at the Warsaw Regional Court canteen. An intriguing tale that provides a distinctive and unsentimental portrait of post-communist Poland. And like the State Prosecutor's favourite delicacy, hard-boiled.

Entanglement

Zygmunt Miloszewski

Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99, 9781904738442