Take Up and Read

Adaf (The Detective’s Complaint) concludes his epic Lost Detective Trilogy with an extraordinary blend of science fiction, crime, and high fantasy. Elish Ben Zaken, a retired private detective, is dead from an apparent suicide, and his niece Tahel and nephew Oshri pick up the loose ends from Elish’s pending cases. They seek out Nahum Farkash for help, a 30-something poet and librarian who, like Elish, grew up in the Israeli Moroccan Jewish community. Nahum accepts, though he has his hands full with protecting the legacy of singer-songwriter Dalia Shushan—with whom he had a tryst when they were teens, and whose long-ago murder was solved by Elish—from an exploitative documentary film production. Meanwhile, his library considers adopting a literacy program titled “Take Up and Read,” conceived by corporate tool Therese Kavillio to mine data from readers. But there is more to Therese than meets the eye, and it seems no coincidence that the program’s title phrase shows up in a song Dalia wrote and recorded for Nahum that he kept hidden on his phone. The story jumps ahead in time to a bleak dystopian future in which Israeli and Palestinian societies have each been reshaped by a catastrophic war. As with the previous installments, Adaf’s rich characterizations are complemented by the clever prose. The result is an instant classic. (Aug.)