Invisible City

by Julia Dahl

When her editor sends her to get a story at scrap yard where a woman's dead body has been discovered, freelancer Rebekah Roberts finds herself face-to-face with the Hasidic community her mother once ran away from.

Rebekah never knew her mother, Aviva. A year after Rebekah's birth, Aviva abandoned Rebekah and her father to return to the Hasidic world she came from.

As Rebekah digs deeper into the life of Rivka Mendelssohn, the murder victim, the more similarities with Aviva Rebekah  she sees.

Married to the much older owner of the scrap yard, Rivka had four children, one of whom had recently died. She reportedly had been making visits to a house on Coney Island designed to help members of the tightly knit, rigidly observant Hasidic community explore life outside the community. There were rumors as well that she was involved in an extra-marital affair.

The Auschwitz Violinist

by Jonathan Dunsky

In this, the third of Jonathan Dunsky's Adam Lapid mystery series, Lapid sees a man on a Tel Aviv street that he hasn't seen since his imprisonment in Auschwitz.

The man, Yosef Kaplon, had vanished so quickly from the barracks that Lapid believed he had been killed. Kaplon tells him that he survived Auschwitz thanks to his mother: the violin lessons she forced him to take allowed him to become a member of the orchestra that greeted new arrivals to Auschwitz.

Kaplon invites Lapid to come to a cafe and hear him play. It turns into a magical evening for Lapid, filled with bittersweet memories.  Surrounded by people speaking his native Hungarian, eating goulash that rivals that of his own mother and listening to Kaplon's heavenly music, Lapid is reminded of all he lost at Auschwitz.

Ten Years Gone

by Jonathan Dunsky

Private investigator Adam Lapid is a former detective with the Hungarian police and a decorated soldier who served in the Negev Desert during Israel's War of Independence.

He is also a survivor of Auschwitz, struggling to survive post-war life in Tel Aviv. 

His nights are riddled with nightmares; his days haunted by ghosts; his soul heavy with losses and experiences he cannot share.

When a small, faded, thin woman -- Henrietta Ackerland -- asks for his help finding her son in July 1949, Lapid listens with a sinking heart. He feels, as vividly as he feels the scorching July heat, that this is a futile mission that will end in heart-break.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

By Michael Chabon

If Raymond Chandler had sat down with Isaac Bashevis Singer over a bottle of schnapps, they might have produced The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union combines a noir murder mystery with Jewish messianic beliefs in a “what if . . . “ context that springs from an actual historical fact.

Chabon’s starting point is the 1940 Slattery Report that recommended that Alaska be used for temporarily resettling European Jews fleeing the Nazis. Ultimately, Alaska Territory Delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives Anthony J. Dimond prevented a vote on the Slattery recommendation from ever taking place.

The Fifth Servant

by Kenneth Wishnia

It’s the eve of both the sabbath and Passover, when the assistant synagogue caretaker (shammes) Benyamin Ben-Akiva is called from sleep by the broken cry of a girl’s name. It’s 1592 and Benyamin is a Talmudic scholar recently arrived in Prague from Poland.

The city is a simmering stew of superstition, ignorance, bitter prejudices and conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Emperor Rudolph II’s tolerance of the Jewish people has allowed a fragile refuge inside the gates of the Jewish ghetto. But with preparations for Passover and Easter happening elbow-to-elbow, tensions are high.

Girl in the Blue Coat

by Monica Hesse

At 18, Hanneke Bakker has the people-bluffing skills of a con artist, a taste for risk and a heart full of grief that should not have been hers for decades.

Her parents believe she works as a receptionist for an undertaker, Mr. Kreuk, which she does. Her more important work, though, is helping Mr. Kreuk with his sideline, acquiring goods using dead people's ration cards that he sells on the black market. Hanneke helps with the shopping and the deliveries. Her blonde good looks and quick wits help her slide by the attentions of Nazi soldiers she runs into on the streets of Amsterdam.

Waking Lions

By Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Neurosurgeon Eitan Green gets off a grueling 19-hour shift and impulsively decides to drive away his frustrations by racing in the desert around Beersheba. He's admiring a beautiful moon when he hits something -- an Eritrean man about his own age.

As Eitan steps out of his SUV, he wonders what he will find and is paralyzed with fear “because when he takes that last step, he might discover that the man is no longer a man . . . And if the man lying there is no longer a man, he cannot imagine what will become of the man standing there, shaking, unable to complete one simple step. What will become of him.”

Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

When the body of the beautiful and talented Zahara Bashari is found brutally murdered in the attic of an old house in Jerusalem, every secret, every squabble, every tension between neighbors and their diverse communities is exposed by the ensuing investigation.

In the background, relations between the Palestinians and the Jews are simmering into an escalation of the Intifada.

Leading the investigation is Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon, a handsome, brooding, thoughtful man with an unfinished doctorate in history at Cambridge University.

Hill of Secrets

By Michal Harstein

The first sentence of Michal Hartstein's mystery novel, Hill of Secrets, reveals two of the most important things you need to know about this story: "A month before Meir Danilowitz got up in the middle of the night to shoot his entire family and then himself to death, I divorced my husband."

The speaker is 33-year-old Hadas Levinger, a dectective with the Israel Police. The husband she divorced was a man she was still in love with. The reason for the divorce was that her husband wanted children and she did not.

Now she finds herself investigating a quiet, hard-working man no one seemed to have any complaints about who kills not only his wife, but his children, ages seven, five and four months. The crime scene evidence shows that Meir Danilowitz was the killer. But what drove him to such a desperate act?