In Shimon Adaf's Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional
mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre
but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively
readable, these books demand to be devoured. --Lavie Tidhar, author of
By Force Alone
In the summer of 2014, at the height of the Gaza-Israel conflict, Elish
Ben-Zaken met the poet and librarian Nahum Farkash in the border town of
Sderot. They spoke only briefly, but in that brief encounter, Elish
might have missed the key to unraveling the case of a Sderot woman who
disappeared for two days, only to reappear with no memory of her time
away.
In Take Up and Read, Shimon Adaf returns to Farkash's story.
Attempting to defend the legacy of the singer Dalia Shoshan--whose
murder Elish investigated several years before--Farkash tries to impede
the production of a new documentary about her life. Meanwhile, he
reminisces about his past, reflecting on his experiences as a young
religious boy growing up in Sderot.
Fourteen years later, in a militant Israel that has been distorted by
catastrophic war, Elish's niece and nephew are haunted by their uncle's
death and the failure of his 2014 investigation. As Tahel and Oshri
conduct experiments in search of the truth, they draw near to the heart
of a great conspiracy.
In this masterful conclusion to the Lost Detective Trilogy, Shimon Adaf
brings together futuristic biotechnology, parallel universes, and Jewish
mysticism. Take Up and Read addresses a central concern of the
trilogy, interrogating humankind's tenuous grasp on the boundaries of
our selves, and the arbitrary connections between the body,
consciousness, and perception.
