An ACCIDENTAL MURDER: AN AVRAM COHEN MYSTERY

ISBN: 068485032X

Author: Rosenberg, Robert

Condition: Used

From BooklistIn the latest Avram Cohen mystery, the retired Jerusalem police commander has become a best-selling author. When Cohen reluctantly agrees to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair to promote his autobiography, Twentieth Century Cop, he finds a dead body and a bomb in his hotel room. Was someone trying to kill him? It turns out to be much more complicated than that, as Cohen is drawn into a case involving not only his own past but also the murder of his dear friend and protege, Nissim Levy. Cohen is a marvelously multidimensional character: a concentration camp survivor, a Nazi hunter, and a cop whose distrust of ideology made him hated or feared by vitually all of Jerusalem's warring factions. Rosenberg uses Cohen's past effectively to dramatize the bloody history of modern Jerusalem, and he shows again why this ancient city makes an ideal setting for a special kind of crime fiction. Bill OttProduct DescriptionTells the story of a Jerusalem detective, Avram Cohen, who publishes his autobiography and inadvertently inspires a psychopath to murder his longtime assistant, Nissim LevyFrom Publishers WeeklyRetired from the Jerusalem police, reluctantly touring to promote Twentieth-Century Cop, his memoir of his days on the force, Avram Cohen (Crimes of the City) is staying in a German hotel when the chambermaid is murdered and a bomb is discovered under his bed. With his background, Cohen has a long list of enemies to consider, but the field shrinks when, after one of his loyal underlings is killed, Cohen finds himself chasing an old nemesis and battling an assortment of Russian criminals. The pace of the book is languid, almost hesitant, for the first half, as Cohen mulls uneasily over his long, illustrious career. As always, however, Tel Aviv resident Rosenberg's depiction of Israel is a revelation, resonant with social and political subtleties. And Cohen remains one of the most carefully shaded of mystery heroes ("it became easier over the years for Cohen to seal his sorrow away in secret vaults that only he could open"), a man worth spending time with?as is Rosenberg's meditative, psychologically astute prose?even in a relatively weak outing like this one.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Library JournalRetired Israeli detective Avram Cohen?himself on someone's hit list?vows to find the man who murdered his faithful assistant and protege. His search ultimately brings him in contact with the Russian Mafia in Israel. A good psychological thriller from the author of The Cutting Room (LJ 2/1/93).Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Kirkus ReviewsWho 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 protg 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. -- Copyright 1998, Kirkus Associates