New York Times: "Stone packs this brief but moving character study with beautiful writing and much thought about the numbing experience of living with the constant expectation of sudden death from an enemy you can’t quite bring yourself to hate."

The Sacred and the Profane

Joel Stone’s adamantly anti-heroic novel about a former Israeli security officer who has lost his will to live. Although the  book is set up as a private-eye mystery, Levin doesn’t really try to catch his client’s adulterous wife in the act; spying on the lovers is enough for him to develop an obsession with the woman, who turns to him after her paramour is murdered, possibly “another victim of a random terrorist act.” Stone packs this brief but moving character study with beautiful writing and much thought about the numbing experience of living with the constant expectation of sudden death from an enemy you can’t quite bring yourself to hate. Even in a miserable man like Levin, “fellow-feeling for another human was hard to contain.”

By: Marilyn Stasio