“The Unlucky Woman” by Jonathan Dunsky

Private detective Adam Lapid is drinking coffee at Greta’s Café in Tel Aviv. It’s about 1949 or 1950, not long after Israel’s war for independence. A boy hands Lapid a letter; it looks like a woman wants to hire him to find out what her husband is up to in the evenings. He takes the case, believing he knows what he’s likely to find. 

He talks to his client, a woman on bed-rest during her pregnancy because of previous miscarriages. She and husbamd met in a refugee camp after World War II; both survived the Holocaust. She thinks her husband is having an affair; Lapid thinks so, too, but he follows the husband anyway to see where the case will lead. But he, and his client, in for a surprise. Lapid tracks the man to the Hadassah Hospital.

The Unlucky Womanis a long short story published as a single by Jonathan Dunsky, author of the Adam Lapid detective mysteries and other works. Lapid, a Holocaust survivor himself, had been a police detective in Hungary before the war. His wife and two daughters died in the gas chambers; he survived the concentration camp. He made his way to Israel and fought and was wounded in the war for independence. He’s now a private detective, often able to out-guess the police.

Jonathan Dunsky

The story is available as an ebook; its print length would be 68 pages.

Jonathan Dunsky has published four Adam Lapid mysteries: Ten Years Gone; The Dead Sister; The Auschwitz Violinist; and A Debt of Death. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; and other works. He was born in Israel, served four years in the Israeli Army, lived in Europe for several years, and currently lives in Israel with his family. He has worked in various high-tech firms and operated his own search optimization business.

By the end of the story, Lapid is learning that it might be one case he wishes he hadn’t solved. The Unlucky Woman is an entertaining – and poignant – read.

Related:

My review of Ten Years Gone by Jonathan Dunsky.

Top photograph: The old Hadassah Hospital in Tel Aviv; the photo is from the 1920s but the hospital looked about the same at the time of “The Unlucky Woman.”

"Ten Years Gone" by Jonathan Dunsky

Israel Noir. 

It may be a new mystery sub-genre.

D.A. Mishani has his Avraham Avraham police detective novels, set in contemporary Tel Aviv. And now Jonathan Dunksy has published a series of Tel-Aviv-based novels, but with a private investigator as the protagonist and set in the early years of Israel’s modern history, when both the Holocaust and the recently concluded war with the Arab nations hanging heavy over the country.

The first in the series is Ten Years Gone.

It’s 1949, and private eye Adam Lapid spends a good portion of each day at Greta’s Café in Tel Aviv, drinking coffee and playing chess. Lapid is originally from Hungary, where he was a police detective. That is, until he was sent to Auschwitz. He survived; his wife and two daughters did not. And he blames himself for not getting his family to safety until it was too late.

Lapid also uses violence when he deems it necessary or appropriate. He killed at least two former Nazis in cold blood after World War II ended. The Holocaust changed his views of justice. He’s also something of a war hero, for his heroic actions in taking out an Egyptian machine gun nest that had pinned down his unit in the Negev during the war for independence.

He takes on an impossible case. A woman asks him to find her son, the baby she gave to a friend in 1939 who was leaving Germany to try to get to Israel. The woman herself didn’t make it out before the war started but was able to obtain false identity papers and stay hidden under an assumed (and Aryan) name in Frankfort. She’s trying to find her son. But she doesn’t even know if he and the friend made it to Palestine; the British were ferociously trying to stop illegal Jewish immigration to the British Mandate.

Jonathan Dunsky

Lapid talks to police and a journalist, and he’s eventually able to learn that the friend and the baby made it to Tel Aviv and lived under different names. Yet some months after their arrival, they were both gruesomely murdered. It seems a dead end, but Lapid considers his own murdered daughters. And he decides to do everything he can to find the killer.

It’s a dark, fascinating tale.

Jonathan Dunsky has published four Adam Lapid mysteries: Ten Years Gone; The Dead Sister; The Auschwitz Violinist; and A Debt of Death. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; and other works. He was born in Israel, served four years in the Israeli Army, lived in Europe for several years, and currently lives in Israel with his family. He has worked in various high-tech firms and operated his own search optimization business.

Ten Years Gone artfully blends history and mystery in a riveting read. 

Related:

My review of The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything.

My review of The Missing File.

My review of A Possibility of Violence.

Top photo: A bus from Tel Aviv to the town of Netanya in 1949. Adam Lapid takes a bus just like this one to Netanya during his murder investigation. 

“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.