By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO—This mystery novel featuring the continuing character of Police Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon was published posthumously, and author Batya Gur, who died last year,  leaves us with a melancholy legacy.  

Characters in the book voice deep distress over whether Jews have any future in Israel, given its island status in a sea of Arab hatred.  This is hardly the message many of us want to read at a time when Israel is engaged in a two-front war, but chances are publisher HarperCollins may welcome the controversy that such thoughts may engender.  Murder in Jerusalem may mean profits in New York.

Leaving aside the political rhetoric, I found the detective story itself to be a bit clunky.  First a woman is found dead at Israel television's Channel One, the government station, and not long after that one of her colleagues dies of a heart attack while being questioned by the police.  While all this is going on, we experience the mayhem of a competitive television news operation and the contradictions of Israeli society—all the while wondering how much of the  fuss has anything to do with the two deaths under investigation, and how much of it is simply "color commentary."

Striking Israeli workers decide to take a minister of the Israeli government hostage, but she is rescued by a television reporter whom she finds incredibly sexy..  A young reporter, willing to use her body to advance her career, runs afoul of a mysterious Orthodox Jewish group, whom she believes are engaged in criminal activities. Those are just two of the subplots in a mystery that is so peopled with excess characters that, even before a third death occurs,  it is easy to lose the thread of the main story.  

Perhaps all the extra chatter in the book is because the fictional Ohayon believes that if you let people talk, and talk, eventually they will volunteer information vital to solving murder cases..  Or perhaps, it was because author Gur had a premonition of her passing, and wanted to get a lot off her own chest.

Many people enjoyed Gur's previous works, including Murder on a Kibbutz and Bethlehem Road Murder, so for them this book will be essential farewell reading.  For the rest of us, however, this whodunnit is a ho-hummer with too much talk, too little action.