This World War I historical novel pivots between New York City and Germany as a police detective plays cat and mouse with a sinister physician.

The Army’s munitions storage facility on Black Tom Island has been blown up. Germans are suspected, and New York Police Department Detective Max Rothman is ordered to put together a bomb squad to get to the bottom of the incident and conduct espionage for as long as needed. He assembles the squad using Jung’s archetypes as a guide. This crack team goes up against the German spies’ machinations. In a subplot, the philandering Dr. Harold Schwartz, a secret German sympathizer and the head of the Public Health Service on Ellis Island, has gotten nurse Caitlin Ryan pregnant and must deal with that. Meanwhile, Rothman, a widower, falls in love with Maria Richter in a whirlwind courtship. Eventually—after many plot twists—Rothman and Maria decamp for Germany to find the son she had been forced to give up. There, they intersect with Schwartz, who plans to alert the Kaiser to the crown prince’s perfidy and thus prevent a coup. Schwartz winds up in cahoots with Maria’s son’s father, Stefan Zeller. In a very uneasy arrangement, all four sail back to New York on a fishing boat. The fun lies in seeing what will happen next. In this riveting tale, Gordon is a busy plotmeister. The chapters are short and punchy, and circumstances—and allegiances—change with dizzying speed. But those upheavals are sometimes a problem. Even fiction of this kind has to be in accord with life as readers know it. So, for example, when Schwartz, who has ordered the pregnant Caitlin killed, finds himself suddenly in love with her, most readers’ jaws will drop. Later in the story, a character’s remark, “A novel of fiction could not have dreamed this up,” will speak for many in the audience. Some of the scenes are effective as set pieces, but more than once readers will feel their credulity imposed upon.

A gripping page-turner with an improbable plot involving wartime espionage.

This second installment of a religious thriller series stars a humble cobbler.

Gordon’s (The Cobbler’s Tale, 2018) novel continues the story of the legendary tzaddik, a group of 36 pious and supernaturally gifted Jews who always exist in the world in a kind of mystical balance with their evil counterparts, the rasha. Moshe the cobbler, a humorous and unassuming worker in New York, is a tzaddik, the son of a man named Pincus Potasznik, who founded a secret group called the Landsman Society of Krzywcza. For years, New York City Councilman Arnold Lieberman has been searching for the son of Pincus in order to recruit him in the age-old fight against the rasha, here in the form of a Bronx-based Jewish gangster named Solomon Blass and his ruthless son, Myron. Only a teenager in the first book, Moshe is now 60 years old and decidedly nonheroic in his daily routine. But Lieberman is persistent, and soon Moshe is embroiled in a battle that sprawls over the real world and the dream realm. Gordon writes all of this in a smoothly controlled narrative that’s equally adept at both the small, personal details—each main character is well shaped and the bad guys are every bit as three-dimensional as the good guys—and the larger philosophical tapestry inscribed with the minutiae of the cabala. “In order to connect with the Light, we must learn how to face the Opposition, the source of life’s challenges,” readers are told at one point. “The uninitiated at first cringe at this term. However in order to achieve authentic spiritual growth, the Opposition must not be feared, instead it must be accepted as a blessing from the Creator.” Throughout the enjoyable sequel, the author playfully overlays the quotidian New York reality onto a dramatic supernatural backdrop whose existence most ordinary people never suspect. This second volume can easily be read independent of the first.

An entertaining, thought-provoking fantasy in which a plainspoken protagonist is enlisted in a war.