He talks about irrelevant bullshit

"I regard psychology as a pseudo science, and psychological profiling of criminals is just a nice name for what a clairvoyant does. If someone repeats ten times that he can see a body in the woods, he must be right three times out of ten — after all, one-third of this country is forest, and it's easier to bury a corpse there than along the highway."

"In that case, why are we meeting with the profiler?"

"He's a smart guy. Weird, but really smart. And he's read more files than you'll ever set your eyes on. He talks about irrelevant bullshit, as they all do, but sometimes he says a thing or two that make sense."

"A thing or two?" Falk was unable to hide his contempt.

Szacki didn't comment. Falk was right, in his way, but there were some things he'd only understand after fifteen years on the job. For example, that an investigation is like a jigsaw puzzle, a really tricky one, a seascape of ocean waves at night, with ten thousand pieces. At some point you have all those pieces lying on the table, but they're damned hard to connect. And that's when you need someone who can take a look at them and say, "Hey that's not the moon, just its reflection in the waves."

Rage, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, is the third and likely final novel featuring Teodor Szacki as investigator. He's a deeply troubled guy. But also a deeply normal guy, who keeps fucking up in his personal life. And work, well, he doesn't always play by the rules. He fucks up big-time here.

I don't know why I find Szacki so sympathetic. Is it because he's good-looking and a snappy dresser? Is it something to do with his Polishness that I respond to? Do I on some level identify with him? This charismatic man in a midlife crisis is irresistible to me.

Rage is like sitting in traffic, simmering. In fact, several scenes led me to believe the novel would turn toward road rage, but instead it deals with domestic violence and vigilantism. Perhaps "outrage" would've been a more fitting title.

The case at the core of this novel is intriguing enough: what's taken for a decades-old skeleton found in a deserted bunker turns out to have been stripped of flesh just days beforehand. As plots go, it's a serviceable vehicle from which to watch Szacki's personal drama spiral out of control.

Someone is challenging Szacki to redraw the lines between law and justice, between personal and professional, between theoretical and lived experience. Rage colours everything.

[Quite coincidentally, over the last month I've been working on a large jigsaw puzzle of seascape under a blue sky. Sometimes I can't tell which way is up. There's a Polish boat in it.]