The police procedural with a hefty dose of a very awkward romance with a lengthy cringe-making sex scene between a "beautiful demi-god" and his worshipper. It is also replete with homophobic, mysoginistic and sexist attitudes and comments, which is surprising as it is written by a female crime writer, hailed recently as the Queen of Polish crime fiction, though actually the writer, who really deserved this title, Joanna Chmielewska died in 2013 and there is no worthy successor yet.
Another drawback of this novel are its protagonists, Hubert Meyer and Weronika Rudy, an offender profiler and a prosecutor respectively. Meyer, recently divorced from Anka and subsequently married to "the love of his life", Kinga, is again shown as a total jerk in his relationships with all the women of his acquaintance. Instead of being grateful to his ex-wife Anka for bringing him clothes to the office and borrowing him her new car for a lengthy period of time, he cares only about his self-image in the pink car and being a jerk and a technical idiot he brings her car back with stained leather seats, burnt with a cigarette stump and stinking of kefir gone wrong. His current absentee wife, Kinga, is dying of cancer in the US hospital, and Meyer's attitude towards her is a combination of anger, grief and guilt; his previous assertion that she was "the love of his life" and her health condition do not stop him from cheating on her and pursuing other women, Weronika Rudy being just his last conquest. His treatment of Weronika is no better, but on the other hand, her behavior is also a bit immature, her amorous confessions painful to get through. In his professional life Meyer is presented as an expert offender profiler, never wrong in his assessment of the crime and its perpetrators.
Weronika Rudy, a prosecutor involved in inspector Szerszen's current case, is first described as respected and moving up on the career ladder, a few moments later shown as inept and unknowledgeable. Her driving style is hazardous, especially in her career choice, her investigative methods are sometimes questionable. A devoted and desperate mother, a victim of her husband's manipulations, she does not cope well with the troubles in her private life. Adding Meyer to the mix certainly seems a bit strange at this point of her life. But then her sudden infatuation is quite girlish.
The only person that one could empathise with, despite his bad behaviour to small dogs, mysoginistic attitude and his professional super hero worship of Meyer, is a veteran policeman, inspector Szerszen. He commits mistakes, gives not particularly good advice, stays behind the times with electronic devices. But there is something human about him, a bit pathetic, funny and loyal.
The police procedural part is convoluted, there are no real innocents in this case, everybody plotted against somebody to reach various aims, usually bloody or mercenary ones. The interesting part about the book are trivia about the history of the city and the region. I also like the epilogue in Switzerland.