A Strange Death

During World War I, the head of a British spy ring in a Jewish colony in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, the beautiful Sarah Aaronsohn, killed herself when the ring was broken by Turks, leaving behind a letter in which she asked to be avenged. Was she? A Strange Death is the answer to this. But it is many other things, too. A tantalizing murder mystery. A lyrical evocation of Israeli town in the 1970s and of its old farming population, the descendants of the colonists who founded it in 1882. "Hillel Halkin's A Strange Death is a personal adventure into the past whose skilled, gripping prose moves back and forth between the documentary and the imaginative... An artful treatment of history worthy of the highest praise." -A.B. YEHOSHUA