[1] In 2007, Bala was sentenced to jail for 25 years for planning and committing the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski, a Polish small business owner, in Wrocław in 2000.
[3] The case drew widespread media coverage in Poland and resulted in increased sales of the novel as readers looked for clues in the novel to the real-life events of Janiszewski's death.
[3] Prosecutors believed the motive for the killing was tied to jealousy, as Bala had hired a private investigator to spy on his wife, and found out she went on a date with Janiszewski.
[6] The case was the subject of a 2008 investigative article by David Grann in The New Yorker, called "True Crime",[3] later published in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession (2010).
At the 42nd Polish Feature Film Festival in Gdansk, Łukasz Simlat won an award for Best Supporting Actor.