Synopsis
From Elie Wiesel, a gripping novel of guilt, innocence, and the perilousness of judging both.
A plane en route from New York to Tel Aviv is forced down by bad weather. A nearby house provides refuge for five of its passengers: Claudia, who has left her husband and found new love; Razziel, a religious teacher who was once a political prisoner; Yoav, a terminally ill Israeli commando; George, an archivist who is hiding a Holocaust secret that could bring down a certain politician; and Bruce, a would-be priest turned philanderer. Their host -- an enigmatic and disquieting man who calls himself simply the Judge -- begins to interrogate them, forcing them to face the truth and meaning of their lives. Soon he announces that one of them -- the least worthy -- will die. The Judges is a powerful novel that reflects the philosophical, religious, and moral questions that are at the heart of Elie Wiesel's work.
Book Magazine
This tale of mystery and terror from Nobel Prize winner Wiesel concerns five passengers bound for Israel from New York who are forced by a storm to land in a remote rural area. Their host for the night turns out to be a kind of malevolent inquisitor, a self-appointed judge who insists that he'll expose each guest's darkest secret and announces that, at the end of his interrogation, one of them will die. It's a melodramatic, somewhat hoary premise (think of a metaphysical take on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None). But it's riveting. As Wiesel's cast of archetypal characters are compelled to examine their lives, we're gifted again with the kind of philosophical earnestness that the author has brought to all of his thirty-six books. That the novel ends with an explosive plot twist only intensifies its power.