Synopsis
At the center of the story is ex-NYPD cop Dov Taylor, ruinously profligate, recently divorced, and a recovering alcoholic. Now working as a bank guard, Taylor is unexpectedly called on to recover one of the world's greatest and least known treasures: a magnificent 72-carat diamond known as the Seer's stone. The stone had been intended for the dowry in a magnificent and historic wedding uniting two powerful, bitterly antagonistic Hasidic sects.
Now, the Seer's stone has vanished from the sanctum of Manhattan's diamond center and fallen into the hands of the man they call the Magician, a Polish Nazi collaborator and notorious war criminal.
Carrying out the Magician's bidding is a figure equally as frightening: the Cutter, an aging Mossad terrorist as implacable as the Angel of Death, who guts his victims according to the Jewish laws for ritual slaughter. To retrieve the Seer's stone, Dov Taylor must not only descend into an exotic, dangerous domain of mystics who live for God and psychopaths who destroy for their own gain, but also enter the untapped and astonishing depths of his own consciousness.
In a quest no policeman has ever dreamed of undertaking, Taylor forges a link through time and continents with his own exalted ancestor, Hirsh Leib of Orlik, a zaddik and prince of Israel from a nineteenth-century Poland storm-tossed by war and fanaticism. To Taylor, Hirsh Leib has transmitted the spark of saintly power, as well as the key to both the disappearance of the Seer's stone and the riddle of Taylor's personal anguish. Condemned to trust no one, neither former police colleagues nor fellow Jews, Taylor navigates the evils of the old world and the new - struggling to comply with a law older and more awesome than any on the books.
Reviews
Rosenbaum is a writer to watch. His first thriller is big, bright and successfully old-fashioned, bringing to life worlds unfamiliar to most readers. Manhattan's bustling West 47th St. jewelry district and a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn are the smartly described settings into which alcoholic ex-NYPD detective Dov Taylor must delve to find a stolen 72-carat diamond intended as the dowry of the Satmarer rebbe's daughter, who will unite two long-feuding clans when she marries the son of the Lubavitcher rebbe. For both the spirit and the clues to solve the crime, Dov reaches back to his 19th-century Polish ancestor, the zaddik (righteous man) of Orlik, in a lengthy digression involving the diamond's provenance and a disastrous plot to win Napoleon's protection for the Jews. The present-day disposal of the jewel in the finale will strike some as contrived, but the book has many compensations. Rosenbaum's West 47th St. is as authentic as Gerald Browne's 11 Harrowhouse (located in a similar district in London); the villains are nasty on a grand, gory scale; and Dov's struggle with booze is as gritty as Matt Scudder's is in Lawrence Block's A Ticket to the Boneyard . For goyim , there's a glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Rosenbaum's first novel is a strange brew indeed: the theft of a fabulous jewel from Manhattan's diamond district ends up connecting the fate of Poland under Napoleon with the messianic union of two long-hostile Jewish sects. Brooklyn's Satmar rabbi Joel Teitel has been planning to give the 72-carat stone as a dowry to his daughter Esther when she marries Adam Seligson, son of the Lubavitcher rebbe, in the hopes of uniting the two warring clans. So when thieves kill Zalman Gottleib in search of the stone Rabbi Teitel had asked Gottleib to keep safe, and the stone vanishes, the Satmar community, skeptical of police efforts, hires ex- cop Dov Taylor to recover it. Before Taylor can trace it to Gottleib's friend Ariel Levin, Levin too has been killed, and the jewel spirited off, by an assassin called the Cutter; his master, Ladislaw Czartoryski, the Magician; and their shiksa accomplice, Maria Radziwell. So far this sounds like a replay of A Stranger Among Us minus Melanie Griffith, but when Taylor is attacked by the Cutter, he has a vision back to a haimish John Dickson Carr historical romance: suddenly it's 1814, and Taylor's ancestor Hirsch Lieb, the zaddik of Orlik, is involved in a plot with historical figures like Rebbe Yakov Yitzhak, the Seer of Lublin, and Prince Adam Czartoryski, protector of Lublin's Jewish community, to bribe Napoleon, using the same stone, to grant Polish independence. The plot ends in a pogrom just in time to send the story back to the present, where the Magician and the stone reveal a further historical pedigree stretching from Cecil Rhodes's diamond syndicate to Adolf Eichmann and Kim Philby--and where Taylor will have to make one last spiritual connection with his great-great- grandfather in order to foil the theft, save the wedding, and maybe earn a bride of his own. Whew. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The 72-carat Seer's stone, intended as the dowry for a marriage uniting two Hasidic sects, has been stolen. Three members of the Hasidic community have been ritualistically murdered. To recover the diamond, Rabbi Jacob Kalman, a Lubavitcher, enlists reluctant Dov Taylor, a former New York police officer, recovering alcoholic, and descendant of 19th-century Hasidic zaddik (holyman) Hirsh Lieb of Orlik. Taylor fights against becoming too involved, but in solving the mystery, he rediscovers and accepts his heritage. The setting for this well-written and well-researched story is fascinating; the author takes the reader to New York's diamond district and delves inside the world of the Hasidim, revealing its rituals, beliefs, mysticism, and history. A short glossary is included, though many Yiddish and Hebrew words are defined in the text. Recommended for readers who enjoy unusual thrillers.
- Karen Stewart, Colorado Legislative Council Lib., Denver
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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