Faye Kellerman, behold your British counterpart! Violence, elusive clues, a gaggle of potential suspects, forgotten crimes, and a countdown until the next murder are mixed together with a healthy dose of Jewish education in a new, tightly wrought crime thriller, “The Redeemer,” by debut novelist Victoria Goldman.
If you like murder mysteries — sitting on the edge of your seat, not knowing what will happen next, but also comforted by the knowledge that the protagonist is sure to live and the bad guys will be caught — you’ll love “The Redeemer.” As in every good mystery novel, the author makes readers care about her protagonist before she puts her in all sorts of dangerous situations. In this case, the protagonist is Shanna Regan, a journalist. Shanna is considerate and thorough in her investigations; she’s also feisty, headstrong and worldly. Shanna works at a small-town local magazine in Hertfordshire, one of the home counties, as they’re called, in the south of England. Before she arrived in Hillsbury (a fictional town), she traveled the globe, spending time in Afghanistan, Iraq, Indonesia, India and Morocco. Among the novel’s mysteries is the question of what drove Shanna from her exciting career of freelance journalism to working at a dull lifestyle magazine in the middle of nowhere.
Perhaps the bigger mystery surrounding the heroine, however, is her interest in Judaism. What motivates Shanna to intercede on behalf of a visibly Jewish woman being harassed by antisemitic teenagers in the park? Why does she, a gentile, go to the synagogue when the congregants are holding their Hanukkah party? Or to the Jewish cemetery, when unknown mourners are holding a funeral? Moreover, why does Shanna’s mind keep replaying a memory of a girl in her school being bullied for being Jewish? What’s it to her? Over the course of “The Redeemer,” it becomes clear that the unsolved murders are not all that are motivating Shanna to be drawn into the Jewish world of Hillsbury.
As her involvement in the town’s crimes deepens, so too does her understanding of Jewish religious traditions and knowledge of Jewish history.
Raised in Ireland where she attended Catholic school, Shanna knows little about Judaism at the start of the novel, even needing to ask a local resident to identify for her the strange talisman she sees appearing on the frames of Jewish doorways. But as her involvement in the town’s crimes deepens, so too does her understanding of Jewish religious traditions and knowledge of Jewish history. Significantly, readers can learn alongside Shanna, just as readers have learned for decades alongside Los Angeles’s police lieutenant Peter Decker in Faye Kellerman’s bestselling Decker-Lazarus series (Decker and Shanna share something else in common, but I won’t spoil the fun!).
If I have one small complaint against the book, it’s that certain elements reinforce the idea that everything Jewish goes back to the Holocaust. Britain has its own long history of antisemitism, far older than the 20th century, and I would be keen to see a contemporary British novel that makes a usable past of the Norwich blood libel (the first such libel), or the crusades, or the 13th-century British expulsion of the Jews. Yet my quibble is small, since “The Redeemer” invokes the Holocaust in a novel manner, calling to mind the way that Canadian writer Ausma Zehanat Khan wove the tragedy of the Srebrenica massacre and the desire for vengeance into her debut crime novel, “The Unquiet Dead.” Moreover, I should stress, the Holocaust is not the focus of this book, and Goldman does an admirable job of illuminating present-day antisemitism in Britain. In the Afterword, Goldman poignantly notes that “All of the anti-Jewish (antisemitic) incidents in ‘The Redeemer’ are based on real-life events that took place in the UK while [she] was writing the book in 2018 and 2019.”
And as it happens, the Holocaust (or more precisely, post-Holocaust) history that Goldman weaves into her story couldn’t be more timely. It is also the subject of a new film called “Plan A,” based on a true story and starring Michael Aloni of “Shtisel” fame, which is being released this month.
On the whole, “The Redeemer” is a riveting read; I consumed it in two days, dying (sorry, sorry) to find out “whodunnit”! Goldman received an honorable mention for “The Redeemer” in the Capital Crime/DHH Literary Agency New Voices Award 2019, and it’s not hard to see why. She’s clearly talented.
Happily, the book is labeled “A Shanna Regan Murder Mystery,” suggesting there are many more to come. It feels like a bit of a bold claim for a first novel, but I’m pleased to see it. Frankly, I’m ready for the next instalment!
Karen E. H. Skinazi, Ph.D, is Associate Professor of Literature and Culture and the director of Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol (UK) and the author of Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture.
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