“The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything” by D.A. Mishani

The pleasure in reading a mystery novel by Israeli author D.A. Mishanicomes in watching how the story unfolds. The reader usually has a good idea as to the “who” of the whodunit; Mishani excels at developing the “why” and the “how.”

In The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything, Detective Avraham Avraham, now head of the homicide investigating unit, is called to investigate the murder of an older woman in her apartment in Holon, part of the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. She’d been strangled; the signs suggest she know her murderer or she was comfortable enough to allow entry into apartment. The only clue as to whom the killer might be is given by a neighbor, who says he saw through his door eyehole a policeman in uniform going down the stairs shortly after hearing bumps in the apartment above. 

It turns out that the dead woman had been involved in a previous case. She’d been a rape victim and had testified in court, but the rapist was still serving his sentence. The police routinely begin to check with other rape victims, to see if they’d had any recent experiences with a uniformed policeman. One says she had; the policeman had claimed a need to re-interview her because the guilty man was planning an appeal. Patient checking of CCTV in the area yields a suspect.

D.A. Mishani

A policewoman shows the photograph to another rape victim, who says she doesn’t recognize him. But the policewoman can see that the woman may be lying. And in this case, she does know the man in the photograph.

Mishani develops two narrative lines in the story. One is of the police investigation; the other is of a family where the wife knows something is going wrong with her husband. Eventually, the two narratives converge.

The Man Who Wanted to Know Everythingis Mishani’s third Avraham Avraham police procedural story. The first was The Missing File, followed by A Possibility of Violence. In all three, he enters the detail of the daily lives of ordinary people, the people you pass on the street, work with, and perhaps know as part of your own family. Slowly, and almost surgically, he peels back faces and facades to tell a story of murder.

Related:

My review of The Missing File.

My review of A Possibility of Violence.

Top photograph: Apartment houses in Holon, Israel.

"A Possibility of Violence" by D.A. Mishani

Avraham Avraham has just arrived back in Holon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, after a three-month vacation in Brussels. He had stayed with a policewoman he met there on a previous case, and she is preparing to move to Tel Aviv. He stops at his office in suburban Holon, and volunteers to help with work, even though he is still on vacation. The police office is overwhelmed with work, many of the officers and detectives are on holiday, and he decides to help.

He interviews a suspect who placed a fake bomb near a day care center in Holon. The suspect is smart mouthed and obnoxious, but there’s no real reason to hold him; a witness’s identification is too vague and unsure. But this interview draws Avraham into the case, and he boss tells him he must do well. She had written a rather critical report of his handling of the case detailed in The Missing File, but she knows he’s a solid detective, and what happened in the previous case was not his fault. Avraham himself considers it something of a failure.

He suspects the day care center operator knows more than she’s letting on, but she denies any reason for someone placing a fake bomb. He explores other possibilities, but the investigation keeps coming back to the operator. Adding to his frustrations is what seems to be a growing reluctance of his girlfriend in Belgium to come to Israel, and he doesn’t know why.

And then the day care operator is attacked and nearly killed.

D.A. Mishani

A Possibility of Violence, published in English in 2014, is the second of three Avraham Avraham detective novels by Israeli author D.A. Mishani, a crime writer and scholar of historical detective fiction. He lives in Tel Aviv and teaches at Tel Aviv University. The second novel in the series is The Missing File (2013) and the third is The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything (2016). This second novel won the Bernstein Prize in 2014 for the best novel published in Israel. It was translated into English from the Hebrew by Todd Hasak-Lowy.

Mishani artfully blends Avraham’s private and public lives, along with his internal doubts and public professionalism. The detective becomes a recognizable and real person. And The Possibility of Violence like its predecessor The Missing File, transcends the mystery genre. It’s still a good mystery, but it’s also good fiction.

Related:

My review of The Missing File.

Top photograph: An aerial view of part of Holon, Israel, a suburb of Tel Aviv.

“The Missing File” by D.A. Mishani

The city of Holon, Israel, was founded in 1935 as almost a collection of tents in the sand dunes just about four miles from Tel Aviv. Today, it is a city of 188,000, and is known for its industrial base and for being part of the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.

Holon is also the base for Avraham Avraham, a police detective in his late 30s, unmarried, somewhat estranged from his parents. He is struggling with what sounds like a bad case of depression when a mother arrives at the police station to report her teenaged son is missing. It’s only a few hours after school, and Avraham knows that most cases of missing teenagers are resolved quickly. He tells her to go home and wait, and he will check with her in the morning.

The boy is still missing in the morning. The police machinery begins to turn. Avraham’s investigating team interviews schoolmates, neighbors, teachers, and anyone who might have seen the boy. What’s worrisome is that he left his laptop and cell phone in his bedroom. And no one saw him going to school on the day he disappeared.

One neighbor, a teacher at the boy’s school and a one-time English tutor for the boy, begins to tell his own story. He’s almost desperate to be involved in the police investigation, and even makes an anonymous phone call reporting the boy’s body to be in nearby sand dunes. Is he actually involved in the disappearance, or is something really strange happening?

D.A. Mishani

The Missing File, published in English in 2013, is the first of three Avraham Avraham detective novels by Israeli author D.A. Mishani, a crime writer and scholar of historical detective fiction. He lives in Tel Aviv and teaches at Tel Aviv University. The second novel in the series is A Possibility of Violence (2014) and The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything (2016).

The Missing File, translated from the Hebrew by Stephen Cohen, is a crime novel and a psychological novel combined into one story. Mishani probes motivations of his characters, and lets them talk and think for the reader to see what is unfolding. It begins rather slowly, and then builds. From almost the beginning the solution seems obvious, and then it doesn’t, as Mishani slowly unfolds a surprise. And then another. And we realize that, in the world of Avraham Avraham, nothing is ever what it seems to be.

It’s an absorbing, well-plotted story.

Top photograph: A block of apartment buildings in Holon, Israel, via Wikimedia Commons.