Run you down

My review from Reviewing the Evidence reprinted with permission. returnreturnRebekah Roberts, a reporter struggling to recover from the violent fallout when she investigated the murder of a Hasidic woman, is hesitant to reconnect with the woman who impulsively married a Christian and gave birth to her, but then abandoned her to rejoin her secretive, isolated Hasidic community. But her job as a reporter offers her an indirect route into her mother's mysterious world. A man living in a Hasidic community in upstate New York contacts her when his wife is found dead. The police believe it was a suicide. He's convinced it wasn't. The community doesn't want questions raised because it could bring unwelcome attention to them from the outside.returnreturnOnce Rebekah publishes a story about the possible murder, a man contacts her through Facebook, inviting her to a gathering of people who have gone OTD – "off the derech," off the path of ultra-orthodox Judaism. He tells her to get in touch with Sam Kagan, who has also rebelled against the claustrophobic community he was raised in. Rebekah realizes Sam must be her absent mother's younger brother. As she runs down the story, she skirts around the cramped contours of her mother's life, one spent yearning for freedom but bound by family ties and her own past to a closed community.returnreturnThe story is told in two voices, alternating Rebekah's with that of Aviva, her mother, who narrates her own struggle to find where she belongs in the world. Along the way, the author explores how creating a closed society based on rigid laws and detachment from the complexity of the modern world can lead to festering secrets and fatal forms of intolerance and then to a tense yet all too plausible act of violence. It's an engrossing story that takes the reader across cultural borders, and its two narrative voices are a good fit for the theme.