Maror

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It's a thought-provoking, enthralling, and beautifully written book that I wholeheartedly recommend to any reader seeking a unique and immersive literary journey. A web of corruption, drug dealing and violence snakes across the decades and across cities and continents. Exposition is achieved by stealth, for example describing three people that walk past to show the diversity of the place. Cohen has been involved from the start in investigating this, and as his cousin was murdered when he was young, he has a strong desire to bring the murderer(s) to justice.

Benny nurses this against Nir for decades, and eventually he does kill Nir, almost dispassionately - a balancing of the books - at the end of Nir's mercenary story. Another essential female character is Sylvie Gold, a journalist who covers many important events in the story and uncovers many truths that she's unable to publicise. it's certainly a compelling read, although be warned it has a slightly non-traditional narrative structure, which did work well for the story that was being told but occasionally annoyed me.

Maror is the story of a war for a country’s soul – a dazzling spread of narrative gunshots across four decades and three continents. The closest we have to a through-line character is Cohen, a police officer who is – most of the time – a quasi-conscience. For a book set in Israel there is very little Palestine, it's like a giant elephant in the room, looming but seldom mentioned, even though parts of the book are set in occupied territories. A multi-generational saga with cultural and political depth, drawing on the rich, often troubling recent history of Israel, for fans of A History of Seven Killings or The White Tiger.

Son of a police inspector and a cop himself, Avi's deeply compromised through his friendship with Lior Goldin, who becomes leader of one of the most powerful crime families. I am not as familiar with the history as I could me, so I felt like I learned a lot throughout, although there were some notable thread that wasn't really touched on - Palestine. Yet the real success here comes not in transcendence, but in bringing everything down to its fallen state. You know sometimes people describe a book as "chick lit" and I hate to see that used in a disparaging way. In the extended first part – which reads like a stand-alone noir procedural – he and Avi try to figure out who has set off a bomb that, instead of killing Rubenstein, has killed a girl at the elementary school next door.I wondered how much was based in truth: is the author well-informed and giving us reasonably accurate history, or is he irresponsibly misguiding readers in his overheated reach for a hard-boiled mood? And a little more unraveling and he discovers that it might be organized crime but one of the organized parties is the police themselves. Likewise with the incidents, as the characters twine around each other over the long, violent decades: sometimes I know a war or an assassination is coming, but a scandal or a disaster can still blindside me.