Death in Breslau, By Marek Krajewski trs Danusia Stok

Breslau is now Wroclaw in Silesia, west Poland, a thriving university city 190km from Warsaw and 160km from the German border. Ever since its origination in the eighth century, the city's position on the east-west trade route, the corridor of central Europe, has attracted a huge variety of migrants, and no end of trouble. From Vandals and Goths and Huns to Czechs, Silesians, Jews and Lusatians, Wroclaw was perhaps the first truly multicultural city in Europe.

Until 1933, that is. Marek Krajewski's novel, the first of his bestselling quartet of thrillers to be translated, takes us to a Breslau in turmoil during the early days of Nazi rule. Göring has just taken over as Minister of Internal Affairs which means the entire Prussian police force is under his jurisdiction. Krajewski's Deputy Head of the Criminal Department, Eberhard Mock, is in some confusion. Should the chain-smoking, chess-loving, Latin-quoting Mock remain loyal to the Freemasons who have been responsible for his brilliant career and hitherto run the city, or should he defer to the Gestapo who are already attacking the Masonic and Jewish communities for being "anti-German"? What's more, Mock harbours a self-confessed weakness for "sensuous Jewish women".

When the scorpion-infested corpse of Marietta von der Malten, a baron's daughter, is discovered, Mock's affinities are further tested. An intricate plot leads to the unveiling of a 700 year-old quest for revenge detailed in a religious script showing elements of Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Mazdaism. Of course, each side struggles to turn the case to their own ends as the "brown-shirt cubs from Neudorfstrasse" stalk, torture and murder suspects and policemen alike. Throw in a young, fatherless cop sent to Breslau from Berlin for being a drunkard, and the paternal Mock now has someone else to keep an eye on.

Krajewski relishes the period detail as he takes us from bloody interrogation cells to Madame Le Goef's sweaty bordello of mainly underage girls. The Polish-German streets, surnames, buildings and menus aspire to poetry, while also providing us with some relief from this Baedeker of Breslau's brutal transformation. Sex and sadism dominate, with Mock himself prone to bringing in a couple of heavies to break a potential informant's resolve – ie his jaw, if not his spine. Another is savagely buggered.

The author keeps the narrative ticking over with pithy descriptions and often elaborate dialogue, both rendered elegantly by the translator. Only once or twice is the translation tripped up by the author's love of complex clauses, which leads to a feeling of clutter by the end of a sentence.

Above all, though, you get the sense that Krajewski is enjoying teasing and tormenting us with numerous examples of the violent coming-together of eroticism and the body-politic. In this respect, Death in Breslau is strongly reminiscent of Alain Robbe-Grillet's Repetition, a novel of fetishistic sex, espionage and the struggle for identity amid the ruins of Berlin in 1949. What's haunting about Krajewski's book, however, is that the worst was yet to come.

James Hopkin is the author of 'Winter Under Water' (Picador £7.99), partly set in Wroclaw