The Woman Who Wasn’t There

Who does the title of this book refer to? Is it Yafit Na’im, a young woman, married with two children, who goes out one morning and vanishes without leaving a trace? Or perhaps it is the woman who is searching for her, Inspector Sigal Shemesh-Levin of the Givatayim police,who is tasked with looking into unsolved missing-persons cases and findsthat there is something about Yafit that she can’t let go of? The idea that the mother of small children suddenly decided to get up and abandon everything seems too unlikely to Sigal, and she is convinced that if she only gives this case a little more time she will uncover the crime that explains this mysterious disappearance. But her efforts to trace the missing mother turn into a dangerous obsession, and the further her investigation takes her, the more the tangle of the motives of the people involved becomes difficult to unravel, until the moment that she finally succeeds—only to see everything immediately becoming entangled once again.The Woman Who Wasn’t There is an intriguing detective story that takes a piercing look at Israeli reality, but is also full of compassion and honesty, as seen through the unrelenting gaze of Inspector Sigal Shemesh-Levin.