The Missing File (Avraham Avraham #1) in Around the World in 80 Books

Jan 19, 2013 Tony rated it really liked it

Shelves: translated-fiction, setting-middle-east, novels, own-loanable

I'm always on the lookout for new international crime books, especially if they're from the Middle East, which is where I spent the first ten years of my life. This first book in a projected series is set in Holon, which is depicted as a rather drab southern suburb of Tel Aviv (I spent 7th grade living in the northern suburb of Herzilya). It introduces Israeli police detective Avraham Avraham, who is on duty when a woman comes in to report that her teenage son hasn't come home from school. This I'm always on the lookout for new international crime books, especially if they're from the Middle East, which is where I spent the first ten years of my life. This first book in a projected series is set in Holon, which is depicted as a rather drab southern suburb of Tel Aviv (I spent 7th grade living in the northern suburb of Herzilya). It introduces Israeli police detective Avraham Avraham, who is on duty when a woman comes in to report that her teenage son hasn't come home from school. This is a very traditional start to a story, one that calls to mind any number of books -- but almost immediately, the reader can see this is not going to fit neatly into our expectations of police procedurals. Avraham more or less dismisses the woman's concern, and she leaves without filing a report. She returns the next day, and only then does the investigation actually open -- the first instance of what will be many cases of the author messing with our expectations concerning chronology and pace.

Unlike the traditional missing persons thriller, the story here unfolds at a rather languid pace, punctuated with microbursts of activity. Even more disconcerting is that Avraham seems kind of confused about what to do and when to do it himself, repeatedly turning to his superior for advice. Despite being told indirectly that Avraham is held in high esteem, the reader will time and again find themselves questioning his competency. This is even woven in to a kind of meta-gag in the book, after Avraham quips that there are no Israeli mystery writers (which is itself not true at all), he receives an eerie phone call from the Shin Bet, who explain why: "The [reason] is that the police in Israel are responsible for trivial investigations that no one would bother reading about or writing a book about, and because most of the police investigators aren't particularly bright. The Shin Bet handles the most important investigations, and no one knows anything about us."

As Avraham stumbles through the investigation (repeatedly being upstaged by a younger, more aggressive colleague assigned to the case) he keeps encountering a neighbor of the missing boy, who is all too eager to help. Any other fictional detective would immediately pounce on this person, grilling them nine ways to Sunday, but Avraham repeatedly blows him off, yet again confounding expectations. Meanwhile, there are parts narrated by this somewhat creepy neighbor, who is a high school teacher struggling to become a writer, including an entire subplot involving his writing workshop. And just to jar the reader even more, in the middle of the case, Avraham is forced to go on an exchange trip to Belgium, where his host is wrapped up in a high-profile abduction-murder case -- a diversion that has no apparent relationship to the main storyline.

Unlike many crime stories, as the story appears to come together at the end, there's little of that serotonin-inducing burst of satisfaction as all becomes clear. Rather, it's a jumbled, frustratingly (for Avraham) ambiguous series of interrogations. Then, in the coda on the final pages, there's a conversation that casts the everything into doubt and elevates the book from an interesting take on genre into something more. The one weakness of the book is the 38-year-old Avraham, who remains such a cipher that it's hard to stick with him as a protagonist, since there's almost nothing there to stick to. Hopefully further books in the series will develop him into a little more rounded, fleshed-out character -- I'll definitely be reading to find out. ...more

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