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Tritt ein in eine Welt voller Geschichten

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Batya Gur

From acclaimed Israeli author Batya Gur, the fifth installment in the Michael Ohayan mystery series set in a politically charged Arab quarter south of West Jerusalem

The body of a young woman with her face smashed in is discovered in the attic of a house on Bethlehem Street, in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem. Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon is called to the scene of the crime where, beyond the usual horror, an old love and an unfinished romance await him.

 As in her previous novels, Batya Gur has spun a complex and fascinating murder investigation that serves as a means for entering a closed world with rules and a logic of its own. But here, the closed world is a Jerusalem neighborhood that enfolds the entire Israeli experience in miniature. Gur wonderfully draws the fissures in this complex world and makes it, like the murder investigation, worthy of further examination. The criminal investigation is set against the background of tensions between Ashkenazis and Mizrahis, hostility between Jews and Arabs, the affair of the kidnapped Yemenite children of the 1950s, and the al Aqsa Intifada in 2000.

Harper Paperbacks

Michael Ohayon Series

Bethlehem Road Murder

From award-winning and internationally acclaimed author, Batya Gur, comes this riveting mystery in which a shocking double murder at Israel's top academic institution brings Superintendent Michael Ohayon to the scene to probe the nature of creativity and unravel the mystery.

In investigating the deaths of a professor of literature and his junior colleague, Superintendent MichaelOhayon raises profound ethical questions about the relationship between the artist and his creation, and between the artist and a moral code. It brings him into contact with the academic elite and reveals the social problems and differing perspectives of Israel’s various classes. 

Known as “the Israeli Agatha Christie, Batya Gur’s The Literary Murder is a clever, compelling, and suspenseful mystery that will leave readers entertained up until the final, harrowing conclusion.

The Literary Murder

With tension as taut as strings on a cello, the fourth Michael Ohayon mystery from “Israel’s Agatha Christie,” in which the police officer must solve the murder of two musicians, is “pure reading pleasure” (New York Times).

After his cellist friend's father and brother—who are also well-known musicians—are brutally murdered, Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon, a classical music afficionado, sets out to solve the crime. From the opening pages, where the detective plays a compact disc of Brahm's First Symphony, to the newly discovered music for an unknown Vivaldi requiem that provides a rock-solid motive for the crime, lovers of crime novels, as well as music, will thrill to every dulcet note.

Murder Duet

The sixth and final novel from beloved and critically-acclaimed Israeli crime novelist Batya Gur—a stunning tale of a beautiful and secretive woman’s murder, set against the politically charged backdrop of the Israeli media

Acclaimed Israeli director Benny Meyuhas’ film production of the heartbreaking work “Iddo and Eynam” promises to be a landmark of Israeli film—until his wife and the films’ set designer Tirzah Rubin is crushed under a set piece, stalling the production indefinitely. 

 But more shocking is what comes to light in the investigation—that Tirzah’s storybook life wasn’t at all what it seemed, and that her death may have been part of a larger network of social and political unrest. The brooding Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon has spent his career surrounded by horrific crimes, but perhaps none most deeply disturbs him than Tirzah’s murder, its strange connection to Israeli labor disputes and religious corruption shaking him to the core. 

 The crowning achievement to a magnificent career, this final installment in the Michael Ohayon series is a wonderful parting gift from the incomparable Batya Gur—one last fascinating visit to an always tumtultous land, in the company of a detective the author and her devoted readers have loved so well.