That Day the Rabbi Left Town

Starred review from January 29, 1996
Rabbi David Small, after 25 years at the Barnard's Crossing Temple, resigns in order to launch a Judaic studies department at Windermere College in Boston. Happily, Kemelman hasn't resigned from his engaging, skillfully plotted mysteries (Friday the Rabbi Slept Late; Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry). In this one, the temple board duly hires a new rabbi. He jogs! In shorts! His wife is a lawyer! And he eventually becomes a suspect in a murder that links village and city as surely as do the snowy Boston and state roads. A fierce Thanksgiving storm figures heavily here-affecting people's movements and their cars, and delivering up a corpse in a snowbank. The victim's identity is not a surprise; nor is the killer's, but reasoning out the intricate means and motive calls for the rabbi's trademark pilpul. Vintage Kemelman-clean prose, quiet wit, absorbing characters and revealing conversations, with David's discourses on Judaism as fascinating as ever.