As a British reader, I have at least a sort of osmotic familiarity with most of the bands and shows and brands and films that get dropped into US crime stories to build a sense of place and particularity, but here some of the names are the same and others really aren't. We’ve known Nir since he was a kid, and in a scene about 80 percent of the way through the novel, he takes a moment to talk with an old colleague, Benny.

Which, without being overdone, give a real sense of a world and a life that are the same in many respects as the Anglosphere. Genghis is heavily involved here, as are various police we have come to know, and when Sylvie finds evidence of the corruption at the heart of this plan, it's made clear once again that she can't publish. This is crime writing in the tradition of Balzac and Dickens and a major achievement, full of sound, fury, drugs and blood… An earthquake of a book. The writing is awesome and I found myself really wrapped in some of the scenes and it was easy to visualise.Nevertheless, he takes part in two separate instances where the wrong man is punished - first a mentally damaged ex-soldier, and later in the narrative a French tourist. Some of the events are barely relevant to the narrative but they seem to have been included simply because the author enjoyed retelling them. Tidhar has created a cast of fascinating characters that tell their own individual stories, which are carefully crafted to interconnect with each another. Tidhar uses the popular songs of the respective decades to underline the move from innocence to moral sophistication, and to highlight the mood of the nation; and while his prose is unadorned, he draws a convincingly vivid picture of Israeli society at this time.

Many real life characters appear, even if only in cameo, and many others are composites or inspired by real people. A murder investigation takes us into the progressive worlds of the kibbutz and the Israeli left, but the pressure to solve crime feeds a harsher realpolitik.And then we join Avi one last time, self-exiled in Cancún, Mexico after some unpleasant dealings in Israel for the uniquitous Benny, and uncomfortably lodging with Lior, who followed him soon after.

His Howard Hughes is an even sicker, more sexually frustrated figure than the worst depictions of the one-time tech hero. I almost gave up with this violent sprawling narrative set over fifty years of Israeli history, because my initial interest was vitiated by the non-stop killings, beatings and torture that pepper the first chapters.In an MDMA trance Avi envisions a “new and different future” where he might avoid his terrible fate as one of Cohen’s bad lieutenants. There’s a lightly disguised Rehavam Ze’evi, nicknamed Gandhi, here rendered as Zrubavel “Genghis” Ha’navi, shot dead in Jerusalem’s Hyatt Hotel in 2001, and presented as an out-and-out sexual predator. it's certainly a compelling read, although be warned it has a slightly non-traditional narrative structure, which did work well for the story that was being told but occasionally annoyed me. You know sometimes people describe a book as "chick lit" and I hate to see that used in a disparaging way.

Maror is a raw account of the unspoken rules that keep society running, find a way to manage the black markets and the unethical deals trusted officials will make to maintain state funding.On the basis of this book there’s something deeply rotten in the state of Israel, and overall I didn’t enjoy it.