No Saving Grace
Books / Hardcover
Books › Fiction › Mystery & Detective › General
ISBN: 0449907333 / Publisher: Ballantine Books, January 1994
Private investigator Matt Jacob is hired to find the truth behind the bizarre slayings of a Hasidic rabbi and a white supremacist hatemonger
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He's seen his share of life's darker side as a social worker - and more than his share of its underside as a private eye in the less-than-blueblood districts of Boston. He's tasted tragedy, but counted himself Still Among the Living, and found out the hard way that his business takes a Two Way Toll. He watches too much latenight TV, smokes too many cigarettes, and thinks too much for his own good. Sometimes high, often down, but never out, Matt Jacob is a survivor.Maybe that's what draws him to his latest assignment - penetrating the fiercely private world of an embattled Hasidic Jewish sect. In the midst of a holy celebration, a powerful and beloved rabbi is gunned down by the ringleader of a white supremacist hate group - who in turn is shot dead by another rabbi. To help attorney and friend Simon Roth defend the volatile Rabbi Yonah Saperstein, Matt agrees to ferret out the first-hand facts in the double slaying. It's a mission that plunges the streetwise P.I. into places even he's never been - where intruders are not suffered easily, and troublemakers suffer the consequences.Amid the Hasidim, Matt finds a people with a rage to survive. Among the White Avengers, he finds only rage. Though the battle lines are clearly drawn, Matt's moral compass detects a blurring of the lines between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and vigilantism, as he follows them into the hearts and minds of the warring groups' charismatic leaders.Complicating matters even more are Matt's friendship with Rabbi Saperstein's lonely, troubled son, his fondness for a brash young free-lance reporter working the same investigation, and his growing certainty that there's much more behind these murders than prejudice or passion. When Matt's good sense, and some very bad characters, tell him to stay away, Matt jumps in with both feet. But the forces he's going up against could take him out again...feet first.
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