A new departure for historical fiction author Douglas Jackson with his new creation Warsaw detective Jan Kalisz. If Blood Roses attracts enough readers it will be the first of four books chronicling the city's ordeal throughout World War Two through the eyes of his fictional protagonist. 1939 - Warsaw investigator Jan Kalisz is forced to work as an interpreter for Poland's murderous new German masters, shunned as a collaborator by his former friends and with his own wife torn between love and loathing. Yet even those closest to him cannot be told that, for Jan, the war is far from over and he is playing a deadly double game as an agent of the resistance. As the threat of arrest and execution grows daily and Warsaw hovers on the brink of starvation, the body of a young German girl is found horribly mutilated. In retaliation the outraged Nazis swoop to round up hundreds of Poles and Jews who face the firing squad unless the killer is caught. But Traudl Kleist is not the first victim, and as the daily executions begin, somehow Jan Kalisz must convince his Nazi bosses to think the unthinkable. Soon it becomes clear that the only way to do that is to hunt down the murderer himself....M.F