Bethlehem Road Murder - (Michael Ohayon) by Batya Gur (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

From acclaimed Israeli author Batya Gur, the fifth installment in the Michael Ohayan mystery series set in a politically charged Arab quarter south of West Jerusalem

The body of a young woman with her face smashed in is discovered in the attic of a house on Bethlehem Street, in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem. Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon is called to the scene of the crime where, beyond the usual horror, an old love and an unfinished romance await him.

As in her previous novels, Batya Gur has spun a complex and fascinating murder investigation that serves as a means for entering a closed world with rules and a logic of its own. But here, the closed world is a Jerusalem neighborhood that enfolds the entire Israeli experience in miniature. Gur wonderfully draws the fissures in this complex world and makes it, like the murder investigation, worthy of further examination. The criminal investigation is set against the background of tensions between Ashkenazis and Mizrahis, hostility between Jews and Arabs, the affair of the kidnapped Yemenite children of the 1950s, and the al Aqsa Intifada in 2000.

From the Back Cover

The body of a young Yemeni woman is discovered in the attic of a Bethlehem Road house, in a Jerusalem neighborhood famous for its impenetrability to outsiders. The victim, once a beauty, is no longer lovely -- her face has been brutally smashed.

More than the usual horror greets Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon in the closed and inscrutable Baka, for an old love and an unfinished romance await him there as well. But much more is concealed beneath the surface of this gruesome homicide -- as tensions between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, hostility between Arabs and Jews, the half-century-old business of kidnapped Yemenite children, and the al Aqsa Intifada of 2000 add fuel to a terrible fire that might never be contained.

Review Quotes

"Gur takes infinite care with the exacting studies of the characters who give her stories their extraordinary vitality." -- New York Times Book Review

"Gur's outstanding police procedural...can hold its own with the best work of P.D. James." -- Publishers Weekly

"Under the apparently quotidian setting exists a very subtle analysis of Israeli society and history...the intractable tensions between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews breeds hatred and mistrust, and the way to understand them and even, perhaps, to prevent future violence lies in good measure in the way Batya Gur brings them to light. There is a substantial measure of courage and talent here, hiddlen under the pretext of an animable detective novel." -- Le Monde

"Through the investigative techniques of her fictional detective Michael Ohayon, Batya Gur finely lays bare the contradictions that tear modern-day Israel apart. She tells us about racism, fear, hatred, the conflicts between European and Oriental Jews, and the violence linked to the second Intifada. But also - and better than newspaper reports convey - she reveals the incredible love of life in this little country that dances on a volcano." -- Elle

"Marked by keen psychological insights and well-developed characters, Gur's latest also offers a valuable portrait of a divided, contemporary Jerusalem." -- Library Journal

"Batya Gur is a skillful observer of various milieus and the sensibilities within Israeli society. . . . It takes an uncompromising analyst like Gur to make an outsider understand the complicated nuances of a seemingly homogeneous society." -- Standard