Pushes the boundaries of noir in a welcome new direction.
Fifteen tales that capture the magic and mystery of everyday life in West Jerusalem, which has been the main area of Jewish population from the time of Israeli independence in 1948.
No volume about Jerusalem could ignore the occupation. This one kicks off with Yiftach Ashkenazi’s “A Great Bunch of Guys,” set at a checkpoint at the northern border of the city, and Ilana Bernstein’s ironically titled “You Can’t See the Occupation From Here,” which shows that even in the halls of a great university, you can’t ignore political realities. But most of the stories showcase different kinds of tension. In Liat Elkayam’s “Murder at Sam Spiegel,” a Mizrahi Jewish woman tries to find her place at a largely Ashkenazi film school. In Asaf Schurr’s “Chrysanthemums,” a father tries to conceal his daughter’s involvement in a perhaps-fatal traffic accident. Translator Greenspan chronicles an aging writer’s mental decline in “Top of the Stairs.” But in the volume’s longest and most iconic story, “Dos Is Nisht a Khazir,” Emanuel Yitzchak Levi and Guli Dolev-Hashiloni offer a double narrative with a single theme. Just as signs at the Biblical Zoo inform skeptical haredim in ungrammatical Yiddish that the peccary is not a pig and therefore can be included in the zoo’s collection of animals named in scripture, young Be’eri struggles to explain to his hoped-for girlfriend just what kind of synagogue he attends, where the Torah is read on Shabbat but men and women sit together in prayer led by a female cantor. The point of Be’eri’s struggle to define his congregation, like the point of the zoo’s signs, is to determine who belongs here. Whether these stories are peopled by soldiers, students, children, and parents, they keep asking, “Who belongs in Jerusalem?” and its corollary, “Who does Jerusalem belong to?”—the central questions of this volume, which handles them with heartfelt sensitivity.
Pushes the boundaries of noir in a welcome new direction.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781617752292
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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