Wiosna zaginionych; Lato utraconych

Anna Kańtoch began her career – successfully – with fantasy (she has received numerous awards for her sci-fi and fantasy novels and short stories). Since 2013 she has also been writing crime novels, advancing to be one of the leading Polish authors in that genre. Her new trilogy (of which two have been published so far – Spring of the Missing and Summer of the Lost) not only consolidates Kańtoch’s position on the Polish scene, but also shows this Silesian author is an independent trailblazer.

We meet the main character of this series in Spring of the Missing as a retired police officer: Krystyna Lesińska is already over 70. But Spring… is no “cozy mystery” and Lesińska herself – caustic, withdrawn, painfully exacting – doesn’t have an ounce of Miss Marple in her. A curse hangs over her life: her brother went missing a half century ago in the Tatra Mountains, and someone killed three of his friends on that same trip. This trauma drove Lesińska into police work, but now, years later and quite suddenly, she has the chance to solve the riddle and even to get revenge… The next book, Summer of the Lost, takes us back in time to the late 1990s. Lesińska is still an active police officer and a complicated investigation is underway in the case of the murder of a married couple and their two children in a remote forester’s lodge. Investigating this crime becomes a peculiar kind of study of human (un)consciousness: who could be the “I” that ended these people’s lives?

Kańtoch constructs the plot with precision, but these novels are linked not so much by crime as by psychological, emotional sensitivity: they’re stories about the paradoxes of memory and personality, of loneliness, isolation, fear and families falling apart. Yet Kańtoch approaches these themes differently than the currently fashionable domestic thrillers – she doesn’t build an atmosphere of danger, but rather opts for the main character’s calm fatalism, seasoned with the fairly cynical misanthropy of a mature woman with no illusions. It’s no surprise that Spring of the Missing received the prestigious High Calibre Prize for the best Polish crime novel of 2020.