The Lost Detective Trilogy

The Lost Detective Trilogy by the celebrated Israeli poet, novelist, and musician Shimon Adaf features Elish Ben Zaken: a lapsed rock critic, sometime philosopher, and unlikely private investigator.

In One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset, Elish Ben Zaken, disenchanted with the commercialized music scene, joins a private investigation agency where he quickly finds himself in over his head. In the sequel, A Detective’s Complaint, Elish has retired and taken up writing detective novels—but a new case draws him back. And in Take Up and Read, the final volume of this genre-exploding trilogy, Elish Ben Zaken is dead—it seems—but his niece, living in a grim, militaristic future, won’t give up the investigation of her uncle’s cold cases.

“In Shimon Adaf’s Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured.” —Lavie Tidhar, author of By Force Alone