A Scribe Dies in Brooklyn

Rabbi Ben, hero of For Whom the Shofar Blows, is back—and more than ever, he’s not your bubbe’s rebbe. Lured to a clandestine meeting with the President of Israel, Ben is asked to find the long-missing third of the Aleppo Codex, the oldest and most authoritative copy of the Hebrew Bible—more than 1,000 years old and rivaled in historical importance only by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Intact until the 1947 sacking of the Great Synagogue of Aleppo, Syria, its surviving pages are now in the Hebrew Museum in Jerusalem. But Rabbi Ben is told that the missing pages have reportedly surfaced in Brooklyn’s Syrian Jewish community, only to vanish again. It’s a job that only Ben can handle.

Plunging into an ingrown and quasi-medieval culture, Ben learns that others seek the Codex, and they don’t play nice. His guide to all things Aleppo-On-Gravesend Bay is Miryam Benkamel, the sassy, sexy, and smart grand-niece of the late and increasingly mysterious man rumored to have smuggled the missing Codex pages out of Syria. Ben must dig deep in his black fedora for tricks to outsmart those who want the pages for themselves. Sparks fly as Ben and Miryam work together to solve the decades-old mystery, and Rabbi Ben feels the heat...in more ways than one!