Ten Years Gone brings together three things I love: Israel, mystery, and sequels. It is the first of four novels by Jonathan Dunsky featuring Adam Lapid, a private detective in post-Independence Tel Aviv. (By first, I mean that the events it narrates come first in the series. It was actually written third.) Having completed it, I’m already on to the next novel, The Dead Sister.

Lapid was a Jewish police detective in Hungary before World War II. His wife and children didn’t survive Auschwitz, but he did. After the Allies liberated Buchenwald, he stayed in Europe for a time, hunting down former Nazi officers and meting out vengeance. Then he immigrated to Palestine, joined the Haganah, and fought heroically in the War of Independence. After the war, he took up private detecting on the streets of Tel Aviv.

In that capacity, a German Jewess who was able to pass herself off as Gentile during the war comes to him with a request. In 1939, she had sent her son ahead with a friend to Palestine, hoping soon to follow in their steps. That didn’t happen. Ten years later, she can’t find either the woman or her son, so she hires Lapid to do so.

The problem? Both the woman and the boy were murdered in 1939. Lapid doesn’t have the heart to tell his client just yet, so instead, he reopens the case to solve their murders. Along the way, he uncovers secrets and lies involving the dead woman, her circle of acquaintances, and the Irgun, the radical group which worked hard in the pre-Independence era to speed both Jewish entry and British exit from Palestine…violently, if necessary.

The tale is competently told. It’s not at the level of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels or Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon novels, but it’s good. My first rule for evaluating mysteries is that it must keep me turning pages to see what happens next. Ten Years Gonedid. I look forward to reading the other books in the series.

Book Reviewed
Jonathan Dunsky, Ten Years Gone: An Adam Lapid Mystery (Charleston, NC: CreateSpace, 2017).

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