Bethlehem Road Murder: A Michael Ohayon Mystery

ISBN-13: 9780060954925 / Angielski / Miękka / 2006 / 384 str.

Batya Gur; Vivian Eden

Opis

The body of a young Yemeni woman is discovered in the attic of a Bethlehem Road house, in a Jerusalem neighborhood famous for its impenetrability to outsiders. The victim, once a beauty, is no longer lovely -- her face has been brutally smashed.More than the usual horror greets Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon in the closed and inscrutable Baka, for an old love and an unfinished romance await him there as well. But much more is concealed beneath the surface of this gruesome homicide -- as tensions between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, hostility between Arabs and Jews, the half-century-old business of kidnapped Yemenite children, and the al Aqsa Intifada of 2000 add fuel to a terrible fire that might never be contained.

Recenzje

"Gur takes infinite care with the exacting studies of the characters who give her stories their extraordinary vitality." - New York Times Book Review

"Gur's outstanding police procedural...can hold its own with the best work of P.D. James." - Publishers Weekly

"Under the apparently quotidian setting exists a very subtle analysis of Israeli society and history...the intractable tensions between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews breeds hatred and mistrust, and the way to understand them and even, perhaps, to prevent future violence lies in good measure in the way Batya Gur brings them to light. There is a substantial measure of courage and talent here, hiddlen under the pretext of an animable detective novel." - Le Monde

"Through the investigative techniques of her fictional detective Michael Ohayon, Batya Gur finely lays bare the contradictions that tear modern-day Israel apart. She tells us about racism, fear, hatred, the conflicts between European and Oriental Jews, and the violence linked to the second Intifada. But also - and better than newspaper reports convey - she reveals the incredible love of life in this little country that dances on a volcano." - Elle

"Marked by keen psychological insights and well-developed characters, Gur's latest also offers a valuable portrait of a divided, contemporary Jerusalem." - Library Journal

"Batya Gur is a skillful observer of various milieus and the sensibilities within Israeli society. . . . It takes an uncompromising analyst like Gur to make an outsider understand the complicated nuances of a seemingly homogeneous society." - Standard

O autorze

Batya Gur (1947-2005) lived in Jerusalem, where she was a literary critic for Haaretz, Israel's most prestigious paper. She earned her master's in Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and she also taught literature for nearly twenty years.