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Aug 27, 2013 Tony rated it it was ok

Shelves: translated-fiction, novels

I read a lot of crime fiction from other countries, and having lived throughout the Middle East, including Tel Aviv for a year, I was excited to read this Israeli bestseller. It opens with the rape of a young single woman and shows the trauma this causes her and her parents. Inspector Eli Nachum is assigned the case, and in his eagerness to bring closure for the family, makes an error in judgement that allows the prime suspect off on a technicality and results in his suspension. As he struggles I read a lot of crime fiction from other countries, and having lived throughout the Middle East, including Tel Aviv for a year, I was excited to read this Israeli bestseller. It opens with the rape of a young single woman and shows the trauma this causes her and her parents. Inspector Eli Nachum is assigned the case, and in his eagerness to bring closure for the family, makes an error in judgement that allows the prime suspect off on a technicality and results in his suspension. As he struggles to come to grips with his error, he teams up with a bullied newspaper reporter to try and uncover the truth. Meanwhile, freed suspect has to try to untangle himself from the crime gang that's got their hooks in him.

The excellently-translated story is told from a few different angles (Nachum, the reporter, some lawyers, and the suspect primarily), and if this shades-of-grey, multiple-perspective narrative, and the themes remind you of The Wire, they should. The author has spoken about that show's influence on his work, and it permeates the story, right down to the police politics and namechecking of Comstat. In many ways, the story could be set in any large city -- there's not too much that mark it as specifically Israeli. I suppose one aspect that's germane to the plot is that some of the connections among characters are rooted in their shared Army service. Another is the proximity and primacy of family in the lives of the characters.

The book's a page-turner, but by the end I was left largely unsatisfied. Many of the characters felt rather generic, and many of the subplots (for example, a will-they, won't-they romance between a prosecutor and defense lawyer) felt recycled. But easily the biggest sin is that the plotting relies on several outlandish coincidences in order to work, and that's something that I can't stand. And if you're the kind of person who likes to suss out who the killer is, at a certain point about two-thirds of the way through, it becomes readily apparent who it is, simply because they're the last significant character who hasn't been checked out (plus, there's a pretty obvious clue about them early on). A much more interesting recent Israeli police procedural is D.A. Mishani's The Missing File and I've heard that the Jerusalem-set Avram Cohen series from the 1990s is worthwhile (starting with Crimes of the City). I also highly recommend the film Ajami for an unvarnished look at the criminal side of contemporary Israel. ...more

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Nov 05, 2013 Anna marked it as to-read

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Oct 27, 2019 Tammy Grimm marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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Around the World in 80 Books