A Detective's Complaint
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"In Shimon Adaf's Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured." —Lavie Tidhar, author of By Force Alone
In A Detective's Complaint, the sequel to One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset, Elish Ben Zaken has traded working as a private investigator for writing detective novels based on unsolved cases from the past. He appears to live an ordinary writer’s life: meeting with his agent, attending literary conferences. But all is not quite right with Elish, who cannot escape his past so easily, especially when his sister’s daughter, Tahel, a teenager and an aspiring sleuth herself, calls on him for help. Tahel has uncovered a mystery: a young woman boarded a bus in Beersheva on a Thursday evening and stepped off in Sderot, close to the Gaza border, on Sunday evening. A bus ride that should have lasted an hour instead took three days, and the young woman remembers none of it.
To assist Tahel—and, he tells himself, to conduct research for his next novel—Elish moves back to Sderot, where he grew up. His sister, Yaffa, has moved her family from Tel Aviv to a new lakeside development there; the property came cheap, despite the attractive setting, and there are murmurs that the developer fled the country before it was completed. Some of the houses still stand empty, and Tahel keeps waking up at night to find her mother staring out at the lake, convinced she is being watched.
Now, in the summer of 2014, Sderot lies near the center of the Gaza–Israel conflict, and sirens and missile strikes are part of the town’s daily reality—as are violent clashes between anti-war protestors and those who oppose them. In this pressurized environment, Elish must grapple with the deep wounds of history, both personal and political, and the human need for answers in a world that offers few.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the moving and perceptive second volume of Adaf's Lost Detective Trilogy (after One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset), retired Israeli sleuth Elish Ben Zaken is still insomniac, solitary, and guilt-ridden over his part in his father's accidental death when he and his sister were children. Now Elish writes detective novels. When he's briefly hospitalized for an acute hearing disorder, a fellow patient describes a niece's brief disappearance and return, seemingly with no memory of her own absence or the passage of time, prompting Elish to call on his old friend, retired police detective Manny Lahav, to help him find some answers. Set during the bloody conflict between Israel and Hamas in July and August of 2014, the action is punctuated by air raid sirens and scrambling to the "safe room." Elish leaves Tel Aviv for a new subdivision in Sderot, to live near his sister Yaffa, her husband, children, and mother. His 12-year-old niece, Tahel, secretly reads his books, while Oshri, nine, escapes their wartime nightmare by reading fantasy novels. Adaf provides charming descriptions of scrappy, headstrong Tahel and dreamy Oshri as they aid Elish and Manny in the case. The author also has a keen ear for the cacophonous region, which Greenspan conveys in a flavorful translation. This series continues to delight.