Overview
Uneasy with his newly inherited wealth, cranky in unwanted retirement, former Jerusalem Police CID Chief Avram Cohen wants to be left alone to suffer. The new minister of police has other plans. Using emotional blackmail, he coerces Cohen into leading a search for the missing heir to the House of Levi-Tsur banking house.
The psychologically disturbed Simon had some peculiar haunts that take the veteran detective Cohen into Tel Aviv's decadent nightlife, then out into Jewish settlements on the West Bank, into the Judean desert, and back to the dangerous underworld of Jewish extremists in Jerusalem. Cohen is tracking the missing man, but what he's really hunting is confirming evidence that the Jerusalem Syndrome, a condition he believes often lies behind acts of terrorism, is at work. It is Cohen's belief that neurotics who visit Jerusalem and confuse their identities with those of biblical characters or believe they receive messages from God cause havoc—and got him into trouble with his own superiors.
While his longtime lover Ahuva, a judge, tries to calm him, Cohen is brought face to face not only with the mystery of Simon Levi-Tsur and his powerful family, but with his own past and present failures.
Synopsis
Uneasy with his newly inherited wealth, cranky in unwanted retirement, former Jerusalem Police CID Chief Avram Cohen wants to be left alone to suffer. The new minister of police has other plans. Using emotional blackmail, he coerces Cohen into leading a search for the missing heir to the House of Levi-Tsur banking house.
The psychologically disturbed Simon had some peculiar haunts that take the veteran detective Cohen into Tel Aviv's decadent nightlife, then out into Jewish settlements on the West Bank, into the Judean desert, and back to the dangerous underworld of Jewish extremists in Jerusalem. Cohen is tracking the missing man, but what he's really hunting is confirming evidence that the Jerusalem Syndrome, a condition he believes often lies behind acts of terrorism, is at work. It is Cohen's belief that neurotics who visit Jerusalem and confuse their identities with those of biblical characters or believe they receive messages from God cause havoc—and got him into trouble with his own superiors.
While his longtime lover Ahuva, a judge, tries to calm him, Cohen is brought face to face not only with the mystery of Simon Levi-Tsur and his powerful family, but with his own past and present failures.
Publishers Weekly
Setting his tale after Baruch Goldstein's massacre of praying Muslims in Hebron in 1994 but before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin the following year, Rosenberg puts Avram Cohen (The Cutting Room), reluctantly retired from the Jerusalem Police, in the middle of Israel's tumultuous politics. Disputes between Palestinians and Israelis and between secular and religious Jews color a murder case. Raphael Levi-Tsur, a London-based banker whose assets and influence are international, hires Cohen to find his missing grandson, Simon, who is about to reach his majority. With digging, Cohen learns that a religious man was looking for the unreligious Simon at his apartment, and he even finds the woman Simon was with the night he vanished near the Western Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem. But he learns all this too late to save Simon, whose body is found in the West Bank wilderness, not far from Hebron. Both the police brass and the boy's family believeor say they believethat Simon was killed by Hamas, or some enraged Palestinian extremist. Cohen isn't so sure. He suspects that a rich, undisciplined and possibly unbalanced young man like Simon could have been an object of interest to some of Israel's Jewish extremists. Nor can he overlook the fact that Simon was interested in some priceless museum pieces stolen long agoembarrassingly, on Cohen's beat when he was a young policeman in Tel Aviv. Rosenberg's mystery derives its considerable appeal less from its puzzlewhich is adequatethan from simply putting an intelligent, observant man in the middle of a complex, volatile society and giving him something to be curious about. (Oct.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Setting his tale after Baruch Goldstein's massacre of praying Muslims in Hebron in 1994 but before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin the following year, Rosenberg puts Avram Cohen (The Cutting Room), reluctantly retired from the Jerusalem Police, in the middle of Israel's tumultuous politics. Disputes between Palestinians and Israelis and between secular and religious Jews color a murder case. Raphael Levi-Tsur, a London-based banker whose assets and influence are international, hires Cohen to find his missing grandson, Simon, who is about to reach his majority. With digging, Cohen learns that a religious man was looking for the unreligious Simon at his apartment, and he even finds the woman Simon was with the night he vanished near the Western Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem. But he learns all this too late to save Simon, whose body is found in the West Bank wilderness, not far from Hebron. Both the police brass and the boy's family believeor say they believethat Simon was killed by Hamas, or some enraged Palestinian extremist. Cohen isn't so sure. He suspects that a rich, undisciplined and possibly unbalanced young man like Simon could have been an object of interest to some of Israel's Jewish extremists. Nor can he overlook the fact that Simon was interested in some priceless museum pieces stolen long agoembarrassingly, on Cohen's beat when he was a young policeman in Tel Aviv. Rosenberg's mystery derives its considerable appeal less from its puzzlewhich is adequatethan from simply putting an intelligent, observant man in the middle of a complex, volatile society and giving him something to be curious about. (Oct.)Kirkus Reviews
However unhappy his retirement from the Jerusalem police has been, former Deputy Commander Avram Cohen (The Cutting Room, 1993, etc.) doesn't intend to get dragged back into an investigation just because an influential somebody cracks a whip. So when powerful banking head Raphael Levi-Tsur's secretary phones asking Cohen to look into the disappearance of Levi-Tsur's grandson Simon, Cohen hangs up, and when the great man himself comes calling with the secretary in tow, Cohen turns his back on them. Not interested. It's only three days later, when police minister David Nahmani suavely offers to swap preferment for an unfairly exiled protégé of Cohen's for his taking charge of the case, that Cohen finally agrees. And by then it's too late, since hedonistic Simon has been killed in the no-man's-land of the suburban desert after disappearing from a nocturnal pilgrimage with an obliging Tel Aviv prostitute to the Western Wall. The motif of tough worldliness crossed with incongruous but equally tough religiosity pursues Cohen as, haunted by remorse for his delay, he tracks errant Simon's involvement with a born-again Orthodox burglar, a missing treasure in gold, and a museum theft four years ago that netted an irreplaceable haul—the golden crowns of King Herod.Written in the shadow of the Hebron massacre, Rosenberg's chilling vision of a dozen warring national and religious parties—each serenely convinced of its absolute justification—has been confirmed rather than dated by the Rabin assassination.