Murder Duet - Hardcover

Gur, Batya

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060172681 ISBN 13: 9780060172688

Publisher: Harper, 1999

Synopsis

With tension as taut as strings on a cello, the fourth Michael Ohayon mystery from “Israel’s Agatha Christie,” in which the police officer must solve the murder of two musicians, is “pure reading pleasure” (New York Times).

After his cellist friend's father and brother—who are also well-known musicians—are brutally murdered, Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon, a classical music afficionado, sets out to solve the crime. From the opening pages, where the detective plays a compact disc of Brahm's First Symphony, to the newly discovered music for an unknown Vivaldi requiem that provides a rock-solid motive for the crime, lovers of crime novels, as well as music, will thrill to every dulcet note.

About this title

About the Author

Batya Gur (1947-2005) lived in Jerusalem, where she was a literary critic for Haaretz, Israel's most prestigious paper. She earned her master's in Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and she also taught literature for nearly twenty years.

From the Back Cover

In this, Batya Gur's long-awaited fourth mystery, the intelligent and charming Israeli policeman Michael Ohayon once again becomes involved in a murder investigation set in a richly evocative Israeli milieu. This time we find ourselves following the strains of the Israeli classical music world.

As the novel begins Ohayon is about to push Play on his CD player to listen to a beloved recording of Brahms's First Symphony. Feeling lonely but assured in his decision to spend the evening alone, he hears what sounds like a baby crying. And indeed, in a stairwell just outside his door in a small cardboard box is a real live baby, wailing furiously. This event leads to his meeting a neighbor, Nita van Gelden, who is a single mother, a cellist, and part of an extended family of internationally known musicians. Nita's brother Theo is a famous conductor, her brother Gabriel a violinist, their father the owner of a prestigious music store. When a member of this illustrious family is murdered, Ohayon becomes involved with the investigation.

From the first strains of Brahms to the newly discovered sheet music for an unknown requiem, Murder Duet unfolds at an allegro pace. Lovers of crime novels, as well as music aficionados, will thrill to every dulcet note.

Reviews

The lives of classical musicians are the focus of the latest entry in Gur's admirable series featuring Israeli Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon (Murder on a Kibbutz, etc.). A divorc? with one adult child, Michael is returning to work after a two-year study leave, and his life is empty and lonely. So when an abandoned baby girl appears on his doorstep, he turns to his upstairs neighbor, a single mother and cellist named Nita van Gelden, for help. Nita belongs to a close-knit family of prominent musicians and music lovers. Her brother Theo is an internationally known conductor; another brother, Gabriel, is a violinist; and her father, Felix, is the owner of a famed music shop. When Nita's father is murdered, Michael faces a dilemma: he wants to lead the investigation, but he's afraid his growing affection for Nita will interfere with his inquiry, which involves the possible discovery of a previously unknown Vivaldi requiem. Gur's small group of suspects live in an insular world devoted to classical music, and she excels at exploring their psychological motivations in her long, complex tale. Relief from the preoccupation with composers is found in Gur's touching portrait of Michael and Nita's obsession with the babies they care for. Though Gur constructs her plot carefully, the novel is most memorable for its abundant digressions on music history and the musical life.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

What on earth would those hard-boiled cops in the 87th Precinct make of Jerusalem's soft-boiled Chief Supt. Michael Ohayon? Not that soft-boiled is anything new among crime fiction cops, but Ohayon pushes sensitive to the edge. Consider this, for instance. Alone in his apartment one night, a ``trembling'' OhayonBrahms's First is on his CD playerbecomes aware of a persistent wailing, as of a baby crying. It is a baby crying. He rushes into the corridor to find same in a cardboard box, abandoned. Chief Supt. Ohayon, the workaholic head of the Serious Crimes Unit, divorced father of a 23-year-old son, lifts the howling infant in his arms, and decides on the spot that he must adopt her. (Shut your mouth, Steve Carella. There are more things in heaven and earth . . . .) Because shes obviously hungry, Ohayon charges into the apartment of Nita Van Gelden, foraging for baby food. Nita is a young mother. She's also, it turns out, a cellist of some renown with two world-class musicians for brothers. Nita has food. Nita has diapers. And soon enough Nita has problemsthe kind Ohayon might be able to help with if only he'd get his head back in the game. First, Nita's father is murdered, next her violinist brother. Are the two homicides connected? You bet, and eventually Ohayon does stop nurturing long enough to sort out the how and the who. It's Ohayon's fourth outing (Murder on a Kibbutz, 1994, etc.), but Dalgleish, Wexford, Morse et al. needn't look back. He isn't gaining on them. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gur's previous Michael Ohayon novels have taken the introspective Jerusalem policeman inside three distinctly insular worlds: those of the psychiatrist, the literary critic, and the kibbutznik. The pattern holds in this long-awaited fourth installment in the superb series. This time Ohayon enters the world of classical music, but he does so without the piercing objectivity he was able to bring to his other cases. The murder victims are the father and brother of a woman, cellist Nita van Gelden, with whom Ohayon shares an intimate, though platonic, friendship, and the timing of the crimes threatens to upset Ohayon's plan to adopt an abandoned baby he has discovered in his apartment building. As Ohayon probes the van Gelden family, all of whose members are celebrated musicians, his relationship with Nita teeters, and his chances of being allowed to keep the baby dwindle. As always, Gur writes with great psychological insight and remarkable sensitivity, this time forcing her hero to confront the polarities of his personality: his overwhelming drive to ferret out cause and effect in the external world, on the one hand, and his obsessive need for personal privacy, on the other. Here, in order to solve the case, he must violate the privacy of someone he loves, and in so doing, allow his own world to be invaded. With a "heavy boot intruding on his private vulnerabilities," Ohayon plunges ahead, unraveling how the discovery of an unknown Vivaldi requiem unleashed a lethal mix of jealousy, greed, and familial rivalry. Numerous crime novelists have used classical music as a theme, but Gur has managed more effectively than any other to integrate musical matters into the fabric of the story. From the foreboding opening notes of Brahms' First Symphony, which Ohayon plays in the novel's first scene, through Nita's brother's discussion of the classical style, the "music-saturated air" informs the novel's substance as powerfully as it does its atmosphere. A virtuoso performance. Bill Ott

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Murder Duet

A Musical CaseBy Batya Gur

HarperCollins Publishers

Copyright ©1999 Batya Gur
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060172681

Chapter One

Brahms's First

As he put the compact disc into the player and pressed the button, it seemed to Michael Ohayon that he heard a tiny cry. It hovered in the air and went away.He didn't pay too much attention to it, but went on standing where he was, next to the bookcase, looking at but not yet actually reading the liner notes accompanying the recording.He wondered absently whether to shatter, with the ominous opening chord for full orchestra, with pounding timpani, the holiday-eve calm.It was the twilight hour at summer's end, when the air was beginning to cool and clear.He reflected that it was a moot point whether a man called on music to wake sleeping worlds within him.Or whether he sought in it a great echo for his conscious feeling, or listened to it in order to create a particular mood when he himself was steeped in fog and emptiness, when it only seemed that this holiday-eve calm embraced him, too.If that was so, he thought, he wouldn't have chosen this particular work, which was worlds removed from the holiday-eve quiet in Jerusalem.

The city had changed greatly since he had come here, as a boy to attend a boarding school for gifted pupils.He had seen it transformed from a closed, withdrawn, austere, provincial place into a city pretending to be a metropolis.Its narrow streets were jammed with lines of cars, their impatient drivers shouting and impotently shaking their fists.Yet he was moved time and again to see how even now, on every holiday eve (especially Rosh Hashanah, Passover, and Shavuoth, but also on Friday evenings and if only for a few hours, until darkness fell), sudden peace and quiet would reign, utter calm after all the commotion and vociferousness.

So complete was the calm before the music spread through the room, so absolute the stillness, that it was as if someone bad taken a deep breath before that first note, held up a baton, and imposed silence on the world.Instantly the nervous, darting, driven looks of the people in the long lines at the ringing supermarket cash registers vanished from his mind.He forgot the anxious expressions on the faces of the harried people hurrying across Jaffa Road with plastic bags and carefully clasping gift basket.They had to make their way between rows of cars with engines running, whose drivers stuck their heads out the windows to see what was holding up traffic this time.All this was now silenced and effaced.

At about four o'clock the car horns and the roar of the engines fell silent.The world grew calm and tranquil, reminding Michael of his childhood, of his mother's house and of the Friday evenings when he came home from boarding school.

When the stillness descended on holiday eves, he again saw before him his mother's shining face.He saw her biting her lower lip to disguise her agitation as she stood at the window waiting for her youngest child.She had allowed him, despite her husband's death and although he was last of her children still with her, to leave home. He returned only every other week for a short weekend, and for holidays.On Friday evenings and holiday eves, he made his way by foot along the path at the back of the hill from the last stop of the last bus to the street at the edge of the village.People, bathed and dressed in clean clothes, relaxed in their houses secure in anticipation of the holiday.The stillness of the hour would hold out its gentle arms to him as he climbed the narrow street toward the gray house on the fringe of the little neighborhood.

Outside the ground-floor apartment Michael had been living in for some years now, all was quiet, too. You had to go down a few steps to enter it, and to stand in the living room and look through the big glass doors leading to the narrow balcony in order to discover the hills opposite and the religious women's teachers college curving like a white snake in order to realize that it wasn't a basement apartment but had been built on the steep slope of a hill.

The voices of the apartment building's children who had been called inside died down.Even the cello up above, which for several days now he had been hearing playing scales at length and then in a Bach suite, was silent.Only a few cars drove past on the winding street at which he now looked, as he unthinkingly pressed the CD player's button.His hands had preceded his conscious mind and doubts.His act caused the loud unison opening of Brahms's First Symphony to fill the room.In a moment what now appeared to be the illusion of peaceful harmony which he imagined he had succeeded in achieving within himself after long days of restless disorientation had disappeared.

For with the very first tense orchestral sound, a great new disquiet began to awaken and well up inside him.Streams of small anxieties, forgotten distresses, made their way from his stomach to his throat.He looked up at the damp stains on the kitchen ceiling.They were growing bigger from day to day, and changing from a dirty white to a gray-black wetness.From this sight, which pressed down on him like a lump of lead, it was a short way to thought and words.For these stains required an urgent appeal to his upstairs neighbors, a talk with the tall, bleary-eyed, carelessly dressed woman.

Two weeks ago he had knocked on her door.She had a squirming, screaming baby in her arms, and she gently patted its back and rocked it as she stood in the doorway facing Michael.

Continues...

Continues...

Excerpted from Murder Duetby Batya Gur Copyright ©1999 by Batya Gur. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060172681
• ISBN 13: 9780060172688
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448