The Book of Stone

Set in New York City in 1998, this unremarkable thriller from Papernick (The Ascent of Eli Israel) features a protagonist many readers will struggle to like. Matthew Stone is emotionally at sea following the death of his father, Walter, a judge best known for compromising a criminal trial with his own bias. When an Orthodox Jew was charged with the murder of an Arab-American in Brooklyn, Walter put his finger on the scales. Walter's own father was a leading member of organized crime, and the Stone family's intense Jewish identity and Zionism has left Matthew indifferent to his religion and his people. When Matthew gets a Christian Arab woman pregnant, he ends up abandoning her in the face of his father's wrath. His evolution into a member of a Jewish terrorist network planning a major attack in New York is both superficial and psychologically underdeveloped. Heavy-handed prose doesn't help ("The Twin Towers rose above the jumbled chaos of Lower Manhattan like the two tablets of the original Law"). (May)