Rina Lazarus is a religious woman who cleans the ritual bath, cooks huge Sabbath meals, and teaches Math at a Yeshiva for boys in “Jewtown”, near L.A. She dresses modestly, covers her hair with a kerchief or a wig, and celebrates the Sabbath by hosting huge home cooked meals for the rabbis of the Ohavei Torah community. After a woman is raped while walking home from the bathhouse, Rina finds herself in the middle of a rape investigation, helping the red-haired goy-detective in charge. Peter Decker is enchanted by Rina, who reveals herself to him as a lover of the Book — which is what “Ohavei Torah” means.
Tag: investigation
Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith
It is the story of a happy Captain of a sinking ship. It is the story of Chernobyl, afterwards. It is the story of provisional investigators, provisional policemen, provisional scientists who are provisionally accepted as the mad inhabitants of a zone officially uninhabited, in which no crime officially occurs. The mood is of a cocktail party on an asteroid hurtling toward earth. There we find Arkady, sullen, stubborn, singular, biting at radioactive pickles (“Crisp, tasty, and with a touch of strontium”) and asking questions.
The Lost Army of Cambysus by Paul Sussman read by Gordon Griffin
An English schoolboy’s happy meal: a murder, a bit of Herodotus, a little masochism, a little colonialism, a shovelful of archaeology, a box of cheroots, a little petit bourgeois pettiness, a pretty but not too pretty girl who works with animals, a plain, uxurious police inspector, and a healthy dollop of fetishism in the form of text, genealogically charged artifacts, and dead soldiers: “an army of old men rising wearily from the sands….”
Quite wonderful. A mouthful. Lux.