At the heart of this excellent legal thriller is the conundrum of how it is that the legal team defending seriously evil people can do their job. The novel is set in Poland, but we can look at notorious cases in the UK. Brady and Hindley, Shipman, Dennis Nilsen, Dale Cregan – each had lawyers and barristers fighting their corner in the courts, and trying their best to convince the jury that their clients were innocent. The fact is that the legal teams are taught not to believe or disbelieve what their clients are saying. They have one job, and one job only, and that is to use every skill at their disposal to present the available evidence to the court as persuasively as possible. It is not in their remit to search for ‘the truth’. That is real life, of course, but in crime novels, lawyers regularly break away from witness statements and points of law to go ‘into the field.
Joanna Chylka, senior member of a top Warsaw law firm, is called by an old acquaintance from younger days, Angelika Slezyngier. Joanna is solitary, abrasive, and abrupt. She has few friends, and Angelika is certainly not numbered among them. Angelina’s three year-old daughter has been abducted from the lakeside house, near the border with Latvia and Belorus, and the police have decided that Angelika and her businessman husband, Awit, are responsible.
To the police, the case has all the elements of a locked room mystery. Awit says he set the alarm, covering most of the windows and doors, but not the skylights, at 7.00 pm, when (they say) Nikola was safely in bed. No alarms were triggered, and there is no sign of a break-in, but the little girl is gone. An elderly man, Antoni Ekiel, who lives near the Slezingier house. tells Joanna that he saw Awit walking away with Nikola on the night of her disappearance.
When Joanna and her trainee, a young man called Kordian Orynsk, arrive at the scene, they are confronted with a complete lack of evidence. The house has an extensive alarm system covering all the doors and windows, and it seems a physical impossibility for the toddler to have been taken away through one of the skylights.
Kordian is younger and has fewer battle honours than his senior partner. He is inclined to believe what Angelika and Awit are saying, but Joanna keeps insisting that what he believes is irrelevant. Their job is to convince the court that the Slezyngiers are not involved in their daughter’s disappearance.
Mróz gives us few clues about Joanna’s age or appearance. We are left to assume that she is perhaps in her late 30s, and still very attractive, as she turns heads whenever she and Kordian go into a bar or a restaurant. Her treatment of Kordian is little short of cruel. She is sarcastic, constantly critical of his opinions and judgments, and scathing about his lifestyle choices. She is firmly in the red meat camp, while Kordian is edging towards vegetables or – if he wants to indulge – ethically sourced fish.
The case comes to court, and Angelika makes a statement which turns the case on its head, compels her to employ a different legal team, and puts Awit in the line of fire. When Joanna is involved in a serious road accident, and barely escapes with her life, Kordian has to follow his instincts while Joanna is in intensive care fighting for her life.
In the end, the initial instincts of Joanna and Kordian prove to be wide of the mark, as the fate of Nikola Slezyngier is revealed. The court scenes are intense, and the Polish landscape is a memorable background to this tense and nervy thriller. Disappearance was translated by Joanna Saunders, published by Zaffre Books, and is available now.
When we next meet Charles it is 1964, and much has changed. The streets of the old East End, having been substantially rearranged by Hitler’s bombs, have been redeveloped. More significantly, the Jewish people have largely moved on. Many families have prospered and they have moved out to the comfortable suburbs. Charles Horowitz has also prospered, after a fashion. His chosen career is Law, and in order to rise through the ranks of the socially and ethnically tightly knit Inns of Court, he has abandoned Horowitz and reinvented himself as Charles Holborne.
for those who want to complete the picture, but with The Lighterman it is sufficient to say that Charles has made a very undesirable enemy. It is probably merely an exercise in semantics to distinguish between the equally awful twin sons of Charles David Kray and Violet Annie Lee, but most casual observers agree that Ronnie was the worst of two evils. The homosexual, paranoid and pathologically violent gangster has a list of people who have upset him. The first name on that list is none other than Charles Holborne aka Horowitz, and the brutal East End hoodlum is determined that Charles must be done away with.
Simon Michael (left) combines an encyclopaedic knowledge of London, with an insider’s grasp of courtroom proceedings. I cannot say if it was the author’s intention – only he can concur or disagree – but his writing left me with a profound sense of sadness over what London’s riverside and its East End once were – and what they have become. This is a beautifully written novel which succeeds on three different levels. Firstly, it is a superb recreation of a London which is just a lifetime away, but may as well be the Egypt of the pharaohs, such is its distance from us. Secondly, it is a tense and authentic legal thriller, with all the nuances and delicate sensibilities of the British legal system pushed into the spotlight. Thirdly – and perhaps most importantly – we meet characters who are totally convincing, speak in a manner which sounds authentic, and have all the qualities and flaws which we recognise in people of our own acquaintance. The Lighterman is published by Urbane Publications and is 
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