Book Reviews,  FICTION,  FOUR STARS ****,  Israel,  Mystery

Murder on the Kibbutz by Batya Gur **** (of 4)

kibbutzThere are several reasons to read murder mysteries.  After all, the expectation upon opening the book is something really awful must happen before the story can really begin.  To make a mystery worth reading, of course, the puzzle of figuring out who dunnit must be simultaneously complex and fair to the reader — no random murderer can suddenly appear in the final ten pages, for example.  Great mysteries also teach you something about a time or location you otherwise couldn’t know about, and very few mystery writers are better than Israel’s Batya Gur.  In Murder on a Kibbutz her detective Michael Ohayan is called upon to investigate the murder of a kibbutznik, which in Israel is exceptionally rare.  Gur peels away the layers of the onion that make up a family-like group of 300 people who care about one another, share everything, and despise one another as only family members can.  What I can say, having lived on an Israeli kibbutz, is that every page of description is microscopically accurate, the characters are almost too real to be fictional, and the mystery is hard to solve.