Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts)
For 23-year-old Rebekah Roberts, a stringer for the New York Tribune, a story becomes uncomfortably personal as she seeks to get at the truth. The discovery of the naked body of Hasidic Jew Rivka Mendelssohn, found in a scrap yard owned by her well-to-do husband, brings to mind the anger and sorrow Rebekah feels toward her own mother, a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn who took off when Rebekah was an infant. Her feelings are intensified when Saul Katz, NYPD liaison with the Hasidic community, shocks Rebekah by telling her that she looks just like her mother. As Katz provides Rebekah with inside information and urges her to pursue what is essentially the cover-up of a murder in the closed Hasidic community, she learns that her Jewish heritage goes only so far in her understanding of what she’s investigating. This novel is particularly notable for its combination of a skillfully wrought, increasingly suspenseful mystery populated by well-drawn characters and a deeply sympathetic understanding of a contemporary culture that remains insular for its own understandable reasons. Journalist Dahl’s debut sets a high bar. --Michele Leber