'The Jerusalem File' by Joel Stone

"The Jerusalem File" is styled as a neo-noir mystery story set in contemporary Jerusalem. From the first page, however, the book throws off reflections of its far deeper facets. Joel Stone (the now-deceased author of "A Town Called Jericho") uses his short and elegantly crafted thriller as the occasion for something much more ambitious -- a meditation on the politics of the modern Middle East and, at the same time, the more intimate politics of the human heart. In that sense, "The Jerusalem File" owes something to both Graham Greene and Isaac Bashevis Singer, a debt that Stone has repaid by writing a page-turner that provides the reader with something much more than a neat solution.

Stone finds it necessary to deploy only four principal characters to perform this feat. Levin, a newly retired Israeli security agent, is recruited by a mathematics professor named Kaye to put his wife, Deborah, and her suspected lover, an art historian named Weiss, under surveillance. Not much more can be disclosed about the plot of "The Jerusalem File" without giving too much away, but suffice it to say that readers are more likely to be entertained than shocked by the twists and turns that Stone has concocted.

The deeper mystery, in fact, is the one inside the detective himself. Levin lives in almost total isolation in a small Jerusalem apartment -- he is divorced from his wife, his grown children have gone abroad, his father is locked away in a nursing home in a state of dementia and his mother is caught in a kind of time warp between the stresses of the latest intifada and her memories as a survivor of the siege of Leningrad during World War II. His sole companions are a tank full of tropical fish, and they are dying off one by one. When we first encounter Levin, he is a man on the edge of a late-life crisis.

After a career spent in pursuit of Israel's most violent and determined enemies, Levin despairs at being reduced to the task of trailing an unfaithful wife: "From intelligence analyst he had gone to the gutters -- gone from being a secret eye to a private eye, by any measure a big step down."

But it also represents an act of self-redemption for a man who is bored, lonely and at risk. What else, after all, would fill his days if he were not on the prowl for evidence of Deborah's infidelity? Only an afternoon movie, a cup of coffee at a restaurant table and an "eye-twitching interest in pretty teenage girls."