“When I had things to believe in," he thinks, “they usually broke my heart."
Matt Jacob has seen his share of life's darker side as a social worker — and more than his share of its underside as a private eye in the less-than-blueblood districts of Boston. He watches too much late-night TV, smokes too many cigarettes, and thinks too much for his own good. Sometimes high, often down, but never out, Matt Jacob is a survivor.
Maybe that's what draws him to his latest assignment — penetrating the fiercely private world of an embattled Hasidic Jewish sect. In the midst of a holy celebration, a powerful and beloved rabbi is gunned down by the ringleader of a white supremacist hate group — who in turn is shot dead by another rabbi. To help attorney and friend Simon Roth defend the volatile Rabbi Yonah Saperstein, Matt agrees to ferret out the first-hand facts in the double slaying.
Amid the Hasidim, Matt finds a people with a rage to survive. Among the White Avengers, he finds only rage. Though the battle lines are clearly drawn, Matt's moral compass detects a blurring of the lines between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and vigilantism,
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Creators
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Series
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Publisher
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Release date
February 10, 2015 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781940610252
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781940610252
- File size: 2367 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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January 3, 1994
For his third outing, Boston PI Matt Jacob, a former social worker with one foot still in the '60s, helps lawyer Simon Roth prepare a defense for Hasidic Rabbi Yonah Saperstein, whose arrest for murder is likely. During a recent holiday celebration, Sean Kelly, leader of a hate group called the White Avengers, shot and killed the much loved leader of the Hasidic community; Reb Yonah promptly gunned down Kelly. The Hasid-Avenger quarrel is an old one, and neither side is a joy to investigate. Though Matt is Jewish, he has his own trinity of sorts: marijuana (actually, most any drug), whiskey and television; even when his head is on almost straight he offends the ultra-Orthodox Reb Yonah, who is indifferent to others' efforts to defend him. Yakov, the rabbi's adolescent son, suggests to Matt that his father is more interested in the defense offered by the Never Agains, an international group of Hasidic vigilantes. Matt is puzzled to learn that Kelly doesn't quite fit the racist, Jew-baiting Avenger mold. Klein ( Two Way Toll ) takes a while to muster his players and hit his stride, but when Matt finally gets revved up on the case instead of coke, the situation demonstrates enough complexity, depth and surprise to command his--and the reader's--full attention.
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