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Murdertown
Who’s making a bad neighborhood even worse?
Twenty years ago, kids started turning up dead, chopped into pieces and stuffed into suitcases.
Ten years later, nuns were getting murdered right in their convent, while local children were being abused by the people who were supposed to protect them.
Unfortunately for Chicago P.D. Detective Hank Purcell and his partner Marvin Bondarowicz, the neighborhood’s gone downhill since then.
When a string of seemingly unrelated killings breaks out around Humboldt Park, they begin to wonder if something more than the usual mobsters and gang violence might be behind it. They’re pretty sure they aren’t going to like the answers...
Twenty years ago, kids started turning up dead, chopped into pieces and stuffed into suitcases.
Ten years later, nuns were getting murdered right in their convent, while local children were being abused by the people who were supposed to protect them.
Unfortunately for Chicago P.D. Detective Hank Purcell and his partner Marvin Bondarowicz, the neighborhood’s gone downhill since then.
When a string of seemingly unrelated killings breaks out around Humboldt Park, they begin to wonder if something more than the usual mobsters and gang violence might be behind it. They’re pretty sure they aren’t going to like the answers...
340 pages, Paperback
Published May 11, 2024
1 person is currently reading
14 people want to read
About the author
John Guzlowski
27 books87 followersOver a writing career that spans more than 40 years, John Guzlowski has amassed a significant body of published work in a wide range of genres: poetry, prose, literary criticism, reviews, fiction and nonfiction.
His poems and stories have appeared in such national journals as North American Review, Ontario Review, Rattle, Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Marge, Poetry East, Vocabula Review. He was the featured poet in the 2007 edition of Spoon River Poetry Review. Garrison Keillor read Guzlowski's poem "What My Father Believed" on his program The Writers Almanac.
Critical essays by Guzlowski about contemporary American, Polish, and Jewish authors can be found in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Polish Review, Shofar, Polish American Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Studies in Jewish American Literature.
His previously published books include Language of Mules (DP Press), Jezyk mulów i inne wiersze (Biblioteka Śląska), Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books), Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press), and Suitcase Charlie (White Stag/Ravenswood). Guzlowski's work has also been included in anthologies such as Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Time Being Books), Cherries with Chopin (Moonrise Press), Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration (Editions Bibliotekos), and Longman Academic Reading Series 5 Student Book (Pearson Education ESL).
Winner of the Illinois Arts Council's $7,500 Award for Poetry, Guzlowski has also been short-listed for the Bakeless Award and Eric Hoffer Award, and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and four Pushcart Prizes. He has been honored by the Georgia State Commission on the Holocaust for his work.
In reviewing Guzlowski's book Language of Mules, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz wrote, "Exceptional...even astonished me...reveals an enormous ability for grasping reality."
Born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, Guzlowski came to America with his family as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents had been Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany during the war. Growing up in the tough immigrant neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, he met hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. In much of his work, Guzlowski remembers and honors the experiences and ultimate strength of these voiceless survivors.
Guzlowski received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Purdue University. He is a Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Eastern Illinois University, and currently lives in Lynchburg, Virginia.
His poems and stories have appeared in such national journals as North American Review, Ontario Review, Rattle, Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Marge, Poetry East, Vocabula Review. He was the featured poet in the 2007 edition of Spoon River Poetry Review. Garrison Keillor read Guzlowski's poem "What My Father Believed" on his program The Writers Almanac.
Critical essays by Guzlowski about contemporary American, Polish, and Jewish authors can be found in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Polish Review, Shofar, Polish American Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Studies in Jewish American Literature.
His previously published books include Language of Mules (DP Press), Jezyk mulów i inne wiersze (Biblioteka Śląska), Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books), Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press), and Suitcase Charlie (White Stag/Ravenswood). Guzlowski's work has also been included in anthologies such as Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Time Being Books), Cherries with Chopin (Moonrise Press), Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration (Editions Bibliotekos), and Longman Academic Reading Series 5 Student Book (Pearson Education ESL).
Winner of the Illinois Arts Council's $7,500 Award for Poetry, Guzlowski has also been short-listed for the Bakeless Award and Eric Hoffer Award, and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and four Pushcart Prizes. He has been honored by the Georgia State Commission on the Holocaust for his work.
In reviewing Guzlowski's book Language of Mules, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz wrote, "Exceptional...even astonished me...reveals an enormous ability for grasping reality."
Born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, Guzlowski came to America with his family as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents had been Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany during the war. Growing up in the tough immigrant neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, he met hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. In much of his work, Guzlowski remembers and honors the experiences and ultimate strength of these voiceless survivors.
Guzlowski received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Purdue University. He is a Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Eastern Illinois University, and currently lives in Lynchburg, Virginia.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 4, 2024
Good Read
These cops are no angels but they get the job done, sort of. Strong Chicago neighborhood setting, rapidly unfolding plot and two CPD detective who are brothers in arms. Plus some real Bad Lieutenant vibes. Good book, Guzlowski can write.
These cops are no angels but they get the job done, sort of. Strong Chicago neighborhood setting, rapidly unfolding plot and two CPD detective who are brothers in arms. Plus some real Bad Lieutenant vibes. Good book, Guzlowski can write.
May 14, 2024
A Lyrically Written, Absorbing, and Deeply Affecting Police Procedural.
In 1975 Chicago, police detectives Hank Purcell and Marvin Bondarowicz are up to their ears in homicides in the rapidly deteriorating neighborhood of Humboldt Park—a small-time gangster, a child walking home from a grocery store, an elderly Polish war hero and many more. Are these murders random? Or are they connected by some inexplicable motive? In this third installment of the Hank and Marvin series, Guzlowski paints a vivid picture of urban decay, political machinations, and the efforts of decent people to carry on amid the senseless violence surrounding them
.
The investigation of the crimes will keep you quickly turning the pages, but it’s only part of the story. This book transcends the events that propel the plot by showing us how the crimes affect the people who investigate them. Guzlowski takes us into the psyches of Hank and Marvin, who, after three decades of police work, are struggling to retain their humanity and empathy despite the understandable urge to surrender entirely to cynicism. Every day brings additional reinforcement of the knowledge that brutal crimes will plague innocent people no matter how hard and long the detectives work, and the central theme of the book is why they continue in the face of futility. Guzlowski ultimately answers this question with a metaphor that gives us hope for humanity.
My thanks to the author for providing a complimentary advance reader copy of this book.
In 1975 Chicago, police detectives Hank Purcell and Marvin Bondarowicz are up to their ears in homicides in the rapidly deteriorating neighborhood of Humboldt Park—a small-time gangster, a child walking home from a grocery store, an elderly Polish war hero and many more. Are these murders random? Or are they connected by some inexplicable motive? In this third installment of the Hank and Marvin series, Guzlowski paints a vivid picture of urban decay, political machinations, and the efforts of decent people to carry on amid the senseless violence surrounding them
.
The investigation of the crimes will keep you quickly turning the pages, but it’s only part of the story. This book transcends the events that propel the plot by showing us how the crimes affect the people who investigate them. Guzlowski takes us into the psyches of Hank and Marvin, who, after three decades of police work, are struggling to retain their humanity and empathy despite the understandable urge to surrender entirely to cynicism. Every day brings additional reinforcement of the knowledge that brutal crimes will plague innocent people no matter how hard and long the detectives work, and the central theme of the book is why they continue in the face of futility. Guzlowski ultimately answers this question with a metaphor that gives us hope for humanity.
My thanks to the author for providing a complimentary advance reader copy of this book.
October 18, 2024
Hank and Marvin solve another case in this solid police procedural. Guzlowski has created believable, well meaning, but flawed characters in his two protagonists. Hank and Marvin find them selves struggling with life issues while trying to find justice for the victims. The gritty depiction of this largely Polish neighborhood in Chicago in the early seventies will resonate with those who remember that time and those who are looking for a bit of modern history to enhance their fiction.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews