AN ACCIDENTAL MURDER

Who better to write a best-selling memoir than Avram Cohen, retired chief of Jerusalem’s Criminal Investigation Division (House of Guilt, 1996). And what better way to promote the overwhelmed author’s new book than a series of events at the Frankfurt Book Fair? The plan would be perfect if only Cohen didn’t hate publicizing himself and wasn’t determined to let his memoir speak for itself, and if only he didn’t return one evening to his Frankfurt hotel to find a bomb under his bed and the chambermaid dead in the bathroom. But all this skullduggery, pursued by the dogged if uninspired Frankfurt police, is just a prologue to an even greater shock back home: the murder of Cohen’s former assistant and loyal protÇgÇ Nissim Levy. The powers who replaced Cohen on the Jerusalem force insist first that Levy’s death was an accident, then that it was the work of vengeful gangster Kobi Alper. But Cohen, following the trail of an autographed copy of his memoir, ties the case into Israel’s Russian mob and a killer with a memory even longer than Kobi Alper’s. The rage and pain behind the crime ring true as ever, but the trappings of Cohen’s cluttered fourth case, from his stratospheric success as an unwilling celebrity to Tel Aviv’s notorious Exotica Club, don’t. Better wait for this gifted author’s next installment.