cover image Flying Camel

Flying Camel

Amos Aricha. Dutton Books, $18.95 (274pp) ISBN 978-0-525-24472-1

This fourth novel by a former chief superintendent of the Israeli police rewards the patient reader who is able to overlook the fact that it starts out like a clinker. Aricha ( Phoenix has created a Jewish CIA assassin from Brooklyn who is drawn with little style and has the perspective and elan not of an American but an Israeli. Daniel Kottler is troubled. He wants to resign from the Company but is pressured to carry out one last assignment. His late mother's seemingly worthless jewels are found to be worth millions. He is in love with a descendant of Russian royalty but is kept from her by his secret work. And he is intensely curious about his father, an Israeli operative who disappeared when Daniel was young. Once Aricha stops trying to portray American-Jewish life (of which he understands surprisingly little) and moves to the world in which he is apparently expertintelligence and counterintelligencehis book takes off. As Kottler travels back and forth between the Middle East, New York and Washingtonplotting, killing, discovering leads and contradictions, and solving his mysteriesa thrilling spy novel emerges and rushes to a tension-filled close. (January 22)