FIRST AMAZON REVIEW OF MURDERTOWN

First Amazon Review of Murdertown -- the 3rd Hank and Marvin mystery 

Review of my novel is by David Rabin, award winning mystery novelists

5 STARS -- 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.

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May 3, Polish Constitution Day

 May 3, Polish Constitution Day

May 3rd was always a big holiday for us when I was growing up in the Polish Triangle in Chicago in the 1950s.  There were parades and parties and my parents and their friends singing the old songs they sang in Poland, the songs of hope and Polish honor and the beauty of the trees and fields beneath the Polish sky.  

This is a poem I wrote to commemorate that day.   It's in my book about my parents and the war, Echoes of Tattered Tongues.

Poland 

They’ll never see it again, these old Poles 

with their dreams of Poland.  My father 

told me when I was a boy that those who tried 

in ‘45 were turned back at the borders 

by shoeless Russians dressed in rags and riding 

shaggy ponies.  The Poles fled through the woods,

the unlucky ones left behind, dead 

or what’s worse wounded, the lucky ones

gone back to wait in the old barracks 

in the concentration and labor camps

in Gatersleben or Wildflecken

for some miracle that would return them 

to Poznan or Katowice.  But the world

wasn’t listening or its hands were busy 

somewhere else.  Later, in America

these Poles gathered with their brothers

and with their precious sons and daughters

every May 3, Polish Constitution Day, 

to pray for the flag.  There was no question 

then what the colors stood for, red for all 

that bleeding sorrow, white for innocence.

And always the old songs telling the world 

Poland would never fall so long as poppies 

flower red, and flesh can conquer rock or steel.