In the Sand

In 1973, a few months before the Yom Kippur War, the naked body of a girl is discovered in the sands of Caesarea. Superintendent Ram Dinoor, a highly regarded police detective, joins the investigation team, but the search for the murderer quickly takes an introspective turn. Eventually it leads to the Sinai Desert during the first days of the war. Dinoor, who was born in Poland and lost his mother in the Holocaust, came to Israel as a child and created a new, Israeli identity for himself. His estrangement from his father, a charming Tel Aviv poet who abandoned him as a child, never bothered him especially, until that fateful summer of 1973, when selfconfident Israel had to overcome a crisis that changed it forever. Through his investigation, Dinoor is drawn into the culture of hippies and flower-children to which the dead girl belonged, together with the boy who was with her before her death. It breaks open Dinoor`s restricted world, and after he discovers his relationship to the young boy, his repressed past finally surfaces. In the Sand is a brilliant, moving detective novel. Schiff uses the traditional genre`s structure to explore and ironize on the breaking point of Israeli society.