MURDER DUET

What on earth would those hard-boiled cops in the 87th Precinct make of Jerusalem’s soft-boiled Chief Supt. Michael Ohayon? Not that soft-boiled is anything new among crime fiction cops, but Ohayon pushes sensitive to the edge. Consider this, for instance. Alone in his apartment one night, a “trembling” Ohayon—Brahms’s First is on his CD player—becomes aware of a persistent wailing, as of a baby crying. It is a baby crying. He rushes into the corridor to find same in a cardboard box, abandoned. Chief Supt. Ohayon, the workaholic head of the Serious Crimes Unit, divorced father of a 23-year-old son, lifts the howling infant in his arms, and decides on the spot that he must adopt her. (Shut your mouth, Steve Carella. There are more things in heaven and earth . . . .) Because she’s obviously hungry, Ohayon charges into the apartment of Nita Van Gelden, foraging for baby food. Nita is a young mother. She’s also, it turns out, a cellist of some renown with two world-class musicians for brothers. Nita has food. Nita has diapers. And soon enough Nita has problems—the kind Ohayon might be able to help with if only he’d get his head back in the game. First, Nita’s father is murdered, next her violinist brother. Are the two homicides connected? You bet, and eventually Ohayon does stop nurturing long enough to sort out the how and the who. It’s Ohayon’s fourth outing (Murder on a Kibbutz, 1994, etc.), but Dalgleish, Wexford, Morse et al. needn’t look back. He isn’t gaining on them.