Join Books.org — it's free

Thrillers, Jewish Fiction & Literature, Middle Eastern Peoples & Cultures - Fiction & Literature, Police Stories
An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery by Robert Rosenberg — book cover

An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery

by Robert Rosenberg
Available on Bookshop Write a review

Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.

Log in to track your reading progress.

Overview

"OF ALL HIS MANY REGRETS, IT WAS HIS DECISION TO WRITE HIS MEMORIES THAT AVRAM COHEN NOW REGRETTED THE MOST"

Thus begins An Accidental Murder, the latest book in Robert Rosenberg's acclaimed Avram Cohen mystery series. In a tale that takes the retired Jerusalem detective from Germany's Frankfurt book fair to the Negev desert, as he searches for a murderer in Germany and ends up in the dark netherworld of the new Russian mafia in Israel, Avram Cohen is revealed as never before — a man with a complex past that makes his future most uncertain.

Someone wants to kill Cohen — or so it seems — possibly because of something he wrote in his memoir about his year as an avenger assassinating Nazis after his long-ago liberation from the Dachau concentration camp. But then his longtime protege Nissim Levy is found murdered on the road to Eilat.

Is this a revenge killing somehow aimed at Cohen, or as Nissim's former assistant believes, could the Russian mafioso be involved?

From private nightclubs where mafia kingpins entertain with vodka-drenched feasts to massage parlors where the women work with cold-blooded professionalism, Cohen's search for Levy's killer becomes a twisted journey into a new side of Israel hardly known to the outsider. On the way, Cohen must look back at his own guilt before he can unveil a killer with a misguided but nonetheless profound motive for murder.

This finely drawn novel is, like all the Cohen novels, a portrait of a deeply complicated man trying hard to be moral in a world where greed rules. Building an atmosphere of personal pain and paranoia up until the very last pages of the book, Rosenberg gives us a tour de force.

Synopsis


"OF ALL HIS MANY REGRETS, IT WAS HIS DECISION TO WRITE HIS MEMORIES THAT AVRAM COHEN NOW REGRETTED THE MOST"

Thus begins An Accidental Murder, the latest book in Robert Rosenberg's acclaimed Avram Cohen mystery series. In a tale that takes the retired Jerusalem detective from Germany's Frankfurt book fair to the Negev desert, as he searches for a murderer in Germany and ends up in the dark netherworld of the new Russian mafia in Israel, Avram Cohen is revealed as never before -- a man with a complex past that makes his future most uncertain.

Someone wants to kill Cohen -- or so it seems -- possibly because of something he wrote in his memoir about his year as an avenger assassinating Nazis after his long-ago liberation from the Dachau concentration camp. But then his longtime protege Nissim Levy is found murdered on the road to Eilat.

Is this a revenge killing somehow aimed at Cohen, or as Nissim's former assistant believes, could the Russian mafioso be involved?

From private nightclubs where mafia kingpins entertain with vodka-drenched feasts to massage parlors where the women work with cold-blooded professionalism, Cohen's search for Levy's killer becomes a twisted journey into a new side of Israel hardly known to the outsider. On the way, Cohen must look back at his own guilt before he can unveil a killer with a misguided but nonetheless profound motive for murder.

This finely drawn novel is, like all the Cohen novels, a portrait of a deeply complicated man trying hard to be moral in a world where greed rules. Building an atmosphere of personal pain and paranoia up until the very last pages of the book, Rosenberg gives us a tour de force.

Library Journal

Retired Israeli detective Avram Cohen--himself on someone's hit list--vows to find the man who murdered his faithful assistant and protege. His search ultimately brings him in contact with the Russian Mafia in Israel. A good psychological thriller from the author of The Cutting Room (LJ 2/1/93).

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Library Journal

Retired Israeli detective Avram Cohen--himself on someone's hit list--vows to find the man who murdered his faithful assistant and protege. His search ultimately brings him in contact with the Russian Mafia in Israel. A good psychological thriller from the author of The Cutting Room (LJ 2/1/93).

Marilyn Stasio

Cohen has a quick mind, and it's a pleasure to watch him apply it to the hard issues endemic to his country. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Who better to write a best-selling memoir than Avram Cohen, retired chief of Jerusalem's Criminal Investigation Division (House of Guilt). And what better way to promote the overwhelmed author's new book than a series of events at the Frankfurt Book Fair? The plan would be perfect if only Cohen didn't hate publicizing himself and wasn't determined to let his memoir speak for itself, and if only he didn't return one evening to his Frankfurt hotel to find a bomb under his bed and the chambermaid dead in the bathroom. But all this skullduggery, pursued by the dogged if uninspired Frankfurt police, is just a prologue to an even greater shock back home: the murder of Cohen's former assistant and loyal protégé Nissim Levy. The powers who replaced Cohen on the Jerusalem force insist first that Levy's death was an accident, then that it was the work of vengeful gangster Kobi Alper. But Cohen, following the trail of an autographed copy of his memoir, ties the case into Israel's Russian mob and a killer with a memory even longer than Kobi Alper's. The rage and pain behind the crime ring true as ever, but the trappings of Cohen's cluttered fourth case, from his stratospheric success as an unwilling celebrity to Tel Aviv's notorious Exotica Club, don't. Better wait for this gifted author's next installment.

Book Details

Published
May 1, 2002
Publisher
Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
Pages
288
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780743244169

More by Robert Rosenberg

Similar books