The Missing File
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Sixteen-year-old Ofer left his home in the suburbs of Tel Aviv for school one morning and disappeared without a trace. Police detective Avraham Avraham takes on the case, a seemingly routine investigation that soon spins out of control, taking over his life. It seems that the more he finds out about the boy and his background, the further he gets from the truth. Ofer’s older neighbour and schoolteacher Zeev Avni has some information but gradually becomes one of the main suspects. Will the neighbour’s strange story save the investigation before it’s too late?
Told from the perspectives of both men, The Missing File, is an adept and suspenseful mystery and a rare Israeli crime novel. D. A. Mishani portrays an outstanding picture of suburban life and tensions in Israel. He has created in Avraham Avraham an unforgettable character, both extraordinary in his work but common in his abilities. The Missing File is a true page-turner whose unexpected resolution forces readers to question all they have taken for granted about innocence, guilt and the ways in which truth evades us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the beginning of literary scholar Mishani's outstanding first novel, Insp. Avraham Avraham of the Holon police tells a complainant that there are "no detective novels in Hebrew" because crimes in Israel are straightforward, with no real mystery. Subsequent events show that a crime committed in Israel can offer plenty of mystery. When Hannah Sharabi expresses anxiety about her 16-year-old son, Ofer, who's failed to return home from school, Avraham dismisses her concerns of foul play. As time passes and Ofer doesn't reappear, Avraham feels increasingly guilty. Officials soon launch an investigation, which becomes the obsessive focus of a neighbor of the Sharabi family, Ze'ev Avni, who tutored the high school boy. Avni can't stop involving himself in the case in bizarre and self-sabotaging ways. Mishani, the editor of international fiction and crime literature at Keter Books in Israel, puts his expertise in the genre to good use in combining the procedural and the puzzle with artful misdirection.
