num_pages: 438
description: At the center of the story is ex-NYPD cop Dov Taylor, ruinously profligate, recently divorced, and a recovering alcoholic. Now working as a bank guard, Taylor is unexpectedly called on to recover one of the world's greatest and least known a magnificent 72-carat diamond known as the Seer's stone. The stone had been intended for the dowry in a magnificent and historic wedding uniting two powerful, bitterly antagonistic Hasidic sects.Now, the Seer's stone has vanished from the sanctum of Manhattan's diamond center and fallen into the hands of the man they call the Magician, a Polish Nazi collaborator and notorious war criminal.Carrying out the Magician's bidding is a figure equally as the Cutter, an aging Mossad terrorist as implacable as the Angel of Death, who guts his victims according to the Jewish laws for ritual slaughter. To retrieve the Seer's stone, Dov Taylor must not only descend into an exotic, dangerous domain of mystics who live for God and psychopaths who destroy for their own gain, but also enter the untapped and astonishing depths of his own consciousness.In a quest no policeman has ever dreamed of undertaking, Taylor forges a link through time and continents with his own exalted ancestor, Hirsh Leib of Orlik, a zaddik and prince of Israel from a nineteenth-century Poland storm-tossed by war and fanaticism. To Taylor, Hirsh Leib has transmitted the spark of saintly power, as well as the key to both the disappearance of the Seer's stone and the riddle of Taylor's personal anguish. Condemned to trust no one, neither former police colleagues nor fellow Jews, Taylor navigates the evils of the old world and the new - struggling to comply with a law older and more awesome than any on the books.
language: English
title: Zaddik
titlecomplete: Zaddik
genres: Fiction
ratings_count: 83
awards: awardedAt: 757411200000
name: Edgar Award
category: Best First Novel
publisher: Mysterious Press