Run You Down

April 27, 2015
The plot of Edgar-finalist Dahl’s so-so second novel featuring New York City reporter Rebekah Roberts (after 2014’s Invisible City) is as much about Rebekah’s struggles with the possible reentry into her life of her estranged mother, Aviva Kagan, as it is about her investigation into a suspected homicide. Levi Goldin, whose wife was found dead in a bathtub, disputes the official verdict of suicide, and asks Rebekah to dig deeper. Rebekah is still recovering from the trauma, both physical and mental, of her first mystery involving the ultraorthodox Jewish community, and she soon abandons her current job doing rewrites behind a desk. Flashbacks from the perspective of Aviva, who abandoned her daughter as an infant and who married out of her faith, detail how she rebelled against the strictures of her Jewish upbringing in the very type of community Rebekah now probes. A moving denouement makes up in part for the less than compelling mother-daughter story line and a major plot contrivance. Agent: Stephanie Rostan, Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.

June 1, 2015
In her second outing, New York Tribune reporter Rebekah Roberts becomes a big part of her story. On desk duty after nearly being killed (in Dahl's impressive debut, Invisible City, 2014), Rebekah is asked to look into the puzzling death of young Hasidic wife and mother Pessie Goldin, a death largely ignored by local police and quickly covered up by her community. At the same time, Rebekah is trying to contact her mother, Aviva, who left her family's ultraOrthodox Jewish faith, then abandoned Rebekah as an infant. The professional and personal aspects of Rebekah's life merge when she learns that Pessie's ex-fiance is Sam Kagan, Aviva's younger brother, who had met with Pessie shortly before her death. The Kagan siblings' backstories are revealed against a changing landscape in which life becomes uneasy, even fearful, for members of conservative Jewish communities, as bigotry turns hateful enough to be murderous. Rebekah is maturing personally and in her profession as she faces choices between humanity and journalistic integrity and between family and a story in this compelling mystery with an explosive climax that comes uncomfortably close to home.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)