One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset

August 1, 2022
Set in Tel Aviv, this first volume in The Lost Detective trilogy introduces Israeli private investigator and erstwhile rock-music critic Elish Ben Zaken, who is hired by Police Superintendent Menachim Lahav to investigate the apparent suicide of Yehuda Menuhin, a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. When Elish reluctantly takes the case, he quickly discovers a link to the murder of brilliant singer-songwriter Dalia Shushan, who had been Menuhin's teaching assistant and whom the reader has met in a lengthy prologue that is overwritten, a fault of the entire novel, exacerbated by extraneous philosophizing, which slows the forward momentum of the story. On the other hand, the philosophical musings do help define Elish's character and expound the larger theme of the book, "What is justice?" Another more practical question is, Was Menhuin's death actually a suicide? And, if not, the tantalizing question Elish struggles to answer is not who did it but why. Readers who like their mysteries to stress larger intellectual issues will enjoy this one and look forward to volume two.

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June 27, 2022
The engaging first volume in Adaf’s Lost Detective trilogy, published simultaneously in Greenspan’s translations, introduces brilliant but haunted Tel Aviv private eye Elish Ben Zaken, a former philosophy student, essayist, and Israeli rock critic. After Dalia Shushan, the moody singer for a rock duo, is found shot to death, Elish, 30, reflects on his brief encounter and instant connection with Dalia at Sapir College in the Negev. Complicating things, Yehuda Menuhin, the infamously predatory professor at Tel Aviv University for whom Dalia had more recently been a teaching assistant, has apparently died by suicide following Dalia’s death. Chief Superintendent Manny Lahav, head of investigations for the local police precinct, asks Elish to investigate the suicide as a suspected murder. Emotional insights and flashbacks to Elish’s youth are sinuously written and movingly translated in lyrical prose, and Adaf ably ties up the plot’s tangled complications. More than a mystery, this is a dark and yearning portrayal of Tel Aviv and the southern cities. Readers will eagerly turn to the next two installments.