Hip Set by Michael Fertik, Stirling Publishing © 2020,ISBN 9281912-818082; 184 pages, $14.99.
SAN DIEGO – Oscar Orleans is a university-educated refugee from the Congo, who made his way to Israel, and in this mystery novel serves as a consultant to the Tel Aviv police department in cases involving other Black Africans, regardless of from which part of the sub-Saharan continent they came.
A man of absolute discretion, far more politeness than Israelis are used to, and a lover of ritual, he was attracted to Orthodox Judaism, and converted under its auspices. Nevertheless, his immigration status is unclear; for nearly 20 years he has been waiting to obtain permanent residency.
The inspector, or mefake’ah, with whom he works most closely is Kobi Sambinsky, an Israeli-born descendant of Easter European Jews, whose back story comes to us only in drips and drabs. His subordinate is Lika Cone, a recent Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, who though a rookie in the police department has a highly-trained, logical mind, quite useful in the deductive line of work practiced by detectives. We know even less about her back story.
Yet, we have the feeling as we read Fertik’s first novel bringing these three characters together on the streets of Tel Aviv that we will be reading more about them, possibly even meeting them on our movie or television screens given the fact that Fertik is also a playwright and film writer.
The story begins, as many detective stories do, with the discovery of a body, this one that of a slender African. From the tribal markings on the corpse, Orleans deduces that the victim was a member of the Toposa tribe of South Sudan. Unlike other members of that tribe, however, the victim’s markings do not cover either his face or his forearms – perhaps because it always had been intended that the young man would wear western clothes that would cover up his identifying features.
The first stop on the sleuthing trio of Sambinsky, Cone, and Orleans is to Pastor Michael Kuur, a self-styled minister to fellow Sudanese expatriates, a man who also runs a combination restaurant/ meeting place which serves as the immigrant community’s nerve center. Kuur provides some information, but the two police officers and the consultant sense that Kuur may not be telling them all he knows.
The tale takes us through the streets of Tel Aviv, into the pages of the Bible, to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and provides us insight into the lives of Africans living in Israel. We meet Russian mobsters and Israeli women whose set of hips the bachelor Orleans cannot help but admire.
Along the way to the novel’s denouement, there are surprises – not only about the motive for the young man’s murder – but also about the characters themselves, who in some cases, like the victim, have masked their true identities.
This is a fast read, and I think many readers will enjoy not only the plot but also the descriptions of some of Tel Aviv’s neighborhoods along with an outsider/insider’s observations about Israelis and their ways.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrrison@sdjewishworld.com