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Jonah Geller would not call himself a nice Jewish boy. He never finished college, he works as a private detective for an agency that largely does surveillance work, he likes ham and eggs for breakfast and doesn't call his mother enough. He suffers from intense and troubling nightmares about his service in the Israeli army, as a result of which he has a profound reluctance to fire a gun. When Dante Ryan, notorious contract killer working for mob boss Marco Di Pietra, turns up in Jonah's kitchen uninvited, Jonah expects the worst. Instead, Ryan asks for Geller's help. He has been landed with a contract assignment he doesn't want to fulfill - to wipe out an entire Toronto family, down to the five-year-old son - and Dante, who also has a little boy, can't bring himself to do it. If he doesn't, however, he will be dead meat. So he wants Jonah to find out who really wants the family dead and why. Perhaps then he can get some kind of leverage that will at least spare the child. Jonah is none too happy about any of this. He is, after all, still recuperating from a gunshot wound received in his last, unhappy, encounter with Ryan and his boss. But his early religious instruction kicks in. The responsibility to repair the world, tikkun olam,is one he takes very seriously. Much as he would prefer a quiet life, he cannot ignore Ryan's appeal for help. The two are unlikely partners and one of the pleasures of this book is observing how each affects the other. It's an edgy relationship, certainly - Dante has killed a lot of people and is touchy about being reminded of it - and Jonah has a smart mouth. By the end, however, each has changed in response to the other, though happily there is nothing sentimental about the transformation. This is a first novel and could have done with a little editing, as can most first novels. It is surprisingly sure-footed all the same. Jonah Geller has a strong and individual voice, the plot elements are handled with assurance and, even though the body count is rather high, they all get dead in credible ways. The Toronto of this book will not bring back any of the tourists the high Canadian dollar has discouraged, but it is a city with a strong personality of its own. There has as yet been no promise of further adventures of Jonah Geller, though the possibility is certainly present at the end. I do hope to see him in the very near future. He is contemporary, appealing, and fresh in several senses of the word.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, June 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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