Rebekah Roberts is a stringer for a New York tabloid when she's given her first murder story: "Crane Lady," a Hasidic woman found nude with shaved head in a pile of scrap metal. She turns out to be the vibrant mother of several young children and the wife of the scrapyard owner, a community strong man. When the police investigation appears to go nowhere, Rebekah begins to dig, but her motivation is unclear - her own mother, a Hasidic woman from Brooklyn, disappeared from Rebekah's life when she was an infant. This was a very fine whodunit, with believable characters and an excellent immersion into the world of street reporting. But it engages in a kind of trope which I find tiresome: the intensively religious community (be it Muslim, Christian, or Jewish) which hides deep, perhaps evil, secrets. Dahl attempts to address her one-sided presentation with a monologue in which the medical examiner declaims the benefits of being part of a close-knit community. This feels tacked on and it almost certainly was, probably at the urging of Dahl's editor. It's not that the notion that rigid Orthodoxy and isolation lead to dangerous secrets is wrong; of course they have that potential. Blanket generalizations of this type point to a failure of imagination on the part of the author, though. And isn't imagination the point?
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