One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset

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. (Aug.)