From Publishers Weekly
Joe Dekel, an Israeli journalist, is in New York City to cover a special conference on Jewish-Palestinian peace. There he meets his "Silencer," an American Jew who brooks no criticism of Israel, such as Dekel had expressed in a novel about Israel's invasion of Lebanon. When Dekel agrees (for reasons unknown) to meet his opponent in a warehouse, he finds the Silencer's boss instead--a man in charge of blacklisting "Jewish and Israeli defeatists"--on the verge of death, his skull crushed. Dekel is drawn into a web of deceit and violence that takes him from the U.S. to Israel and back. The hardboiled Dekel's irreverent views about Middle East politics are often grotesquely funny, but the repetitious rhetoric about the Arab-Israeli conflict burdens a plot already overloaded with Dekel's paranoia--he believes everyone from the FBI to the Anti-Slander League is out to get him. And while Louvish ( The Therapy of Avram Blok ) successfully lures us into this paranoid world, he maintains such tight control over Dekel's thoughts that virtually nothing is left to the reader's imagination.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
In a first US publication for Anglo-Israeli author Louvish, the Intifada, the Mossad, American wacko fundamentalism, the NYPD, ultra-orthodox West Bank settlers, the CIA, rabid supporters of all or some of the above, as well as the mayor of Jerusalem, fill the much too exciting days of an Israeli journalist who would rather hide among the TV listings. Television writer Joe Dekel is at the center of the bizarre chain of events that begins with the introduction in New York of someone who says he is Dekel's ``silencer''--Didi Schaeffer. According to Didi, a silencer's job is to see that dangerously pro-Palestinian writings such as Dekel has been known to dabble in never see the light of day on this side of the Atlantic. Dekel is in town against his will, covering yet another hopeless peace forum when he would rather be playing video and other domestic games back in Jerusalem, where he and his wife are thinking maybe they'll have a baby. But before he leaves Manhattan, Dekel stumbles into a murder scene where the expiring corpse either curses him or slips him some sensational information. Sorting this out will require further adventures and involvement with a 100-year-old American Jewish supporter of rational solutions to irrational Israeli governance, murderous encounters with the real Didi Schaeffer, who's not a bit like the fake Didi on the West Bank, a crippling run-in with a stun grenade, and an endless stream of threatening heavies, all of whom have interests in the occupied territories. There's a thriller plot here, but Louvish's heart is in the wry wrappings, hours of observations on Israeli political and moral life with always a finger to the ribs. Action fanciers will drift off early, humor fanciers a little later, policy wonks will make it to the end. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
