Kirkus Reviews: "The line between hunter and hunted, like the line between Arab and Jew, is razor-thin in this spare, pensive but never brooding study of obsessive love."

In this novel by Stone (A Town Called Jericho, 1992), who died in 2007, a retired Israeli intelligence analyst playing detective stalks the adulterous wife of a jealous husband.

Levin doesn’t respect Kaye, doesn’t trust Kaye, doesn’t even like Kaye. But after a life spent armed and disguised on secret government missions, maybe it’s just the thrill of the chase that lures him to play sleuth. So at the behest of his nonpaying client, Levin hides behind a copy of the Holy Land Times and watches Deborah Kaye sip on cappuccino at a café, sitting near, but not with, an art historian named Weiss. Are they lovers? Levin thinks so. If they are, their affair ends in calamity when Weiss is found shot to death, a crime the police ascribe to terrorists. Now it’s Deborah’s turn to seek Levin’s help. She confronts him at the Dead Sea spa of Ein Gedi and, claiming to be Weiss’s cousin, asks him to find the killer. Soon Levin is waiting eagerly by the phone for Deborah’s call. As he ponders the turn of fate that made Semite cousins into irreconcilable foes, he falls deeper under the spell of a woman he barely knows.

The line between hunter and hunted, like the line between Arab and Jew, is razor-thin in this spare, pensive but never brooding study of obsessive love.