Book: Hill of Secrets

[elusivek]

Hill of Secrets: An Israeli Jewish mystery novel
Michal Hartstein
Amazon.com Link

On a blooming May morning, five bodies of a single religious family are found in their apartment, in the quiet suburb of Givat Shmuel (Shmuel's Hill).

Detective Hadas Levinger, a renegade atheist daughter of a religious family, is put in charge of the police investigation. Slowly and skillfully she peels the shells protecting this unique community and reveals hard and painful secrets.

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Overall an interesting read. I was on the fence about giving this a minus the various formatting flaws and misses (misspellings, repetitions - I remember around four instances that four instances it happened - repetition here intentional, and many, many typos) in the end decided to keep 3 stars. I think those errors can be easily fixed by the author sooner or later.

I think if this were not a Jewish based book, the constant religious background explanations would have been tiring, but I found it fascinating as I know nothing of Jewish culture. So probably someone who knows the Jewish culture may find that a little tiring.

The final outcome was slightly surprising but once the big cat was out of the bag, the remaining mysteries were pretty easy to guess. I thought the final show-all was not necessary, as it lends a bit to the whole detective feel, but it helped to clear out small issues (still, personally I thought it unnecessary).

It was a pleasant read, looking forward to others in the series, if there is a series :-)