More criminal Christmas and its the turn today of Lavie Tidhar: My favourite crimes novels are those that go beyond creating a mystery, and explore the social and emotional conditions which make a murderer - less a whodunit and more a whydunit. Some of my favourite books are European - you could not go wrong with Manuel Vázquez Montalbáns The Buenos Aires Quintet, Peter Høegs Miss Smillas Feeling for Snow, or Arturo Pérez-Revertes The Dumas Club - but if I had one book to recommend it would Israeli novelists Batya Gurs Murder on a Kibbutz, published in English translation in 1995 and criminally out of print now. The novel is the third to feature Gurs enduring detective, Michael Ohayon, and takes place on a kibbutz where a devastating murder had taken place. A kibbutz - where I grew up - is a small collective community in Israel run according to utopian Socialist ideals, and the novel is set at the height of an ideological battle in the kibbutz movement in the 1980s. The sense of claustrophobia and hidden secrets, and the detectives patient unraveling of the community, becomes a searing examination of the personal price children pay for their parents ideals. To me, there is no finer novel to explore the hidden world of the kibbutz, and Gurs painstaking, literary approach elevates this far beyond a traditional mystery. Gur, sadly, passed away, too early, of cancer. She remains perhaps Israels most prominent author of crime fiction.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 13:24:49 +0000