Maror

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Connections are made through chaos rather than conspiracy, but their consequences follow the grim logic of corruption. Son of a police inspector and a cop himself, Avi's deeply compromised through his friendship with Lior Goldin, who becomes leader of one of the most powerful crime families. The one constant thread uniting all the many disparate threads is the unsavoury character of Cohen, and I couldn’t relate to him at all. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. It was, Tidhar reminds us, the admired poet Hayim Nahman Bialik who first declared in the 1920s that the Jews would know that their dream of a nation state had been fulfilled when there were Jewish prostitutes, Jewish thieves and a Jewish police force.

This turning point is invoked viscerally as the kids head into Tel Aviv where their despair turns into anger and they set upon an Orthodox man they find in the street.This is the first long-form novel I had read by the author and the short-stories I encountered were from the scifi/fantasy genre. A multi-generational saga with cultural and political depth, drawing on the rich, often troubling recent history of Israel, for fans of A History of Seven Killings or The White Tiger.

Israel as a nation, and those most dedicated to building the nation, don't come out looking pretty from this tale. It's about big things like nation building an criminal syndicates, and small things like families and parties. Another character who, like Benny, takes the amoral path with a certainty of its rightness is Kippy (aka Sarah Gavrieli).

Tidhar (or his translator) doesn’t try for Ellroy’s hard-bop jazz riffing, but he does have a sense of the hardboiled.