I had to come up for a breath of air after reading Stowe so I searched
around on the bookshelf for a likely looking mystery. The David Small
“Rabbi” series have been around for quite a while and, my friend the
local bookstore owner had recommended them to me a while back so I
thought, what the hey, I’ll give this one a try. Rabbi and detective are
two words I normally don’t associate in the same thought so if detectives
have a “gimmick” and they usually do, then this sounded at least unique.

Rabbi Small is a young rabbinical scholar serving as Rabbi to a small
congregation in Barnard Crossings, a small town in Massachusetts. The
synagogue is fairly new and serves Orthodox, Reform and Conservative
believers, giving Rabbi Small a thin line to tread when dealing with the
politics of the congregation. On the eve of Yom Kippur, a man is found
dead in his garage of carbon monoxide poisoning. His wife, a Gentile,
wants him buried in the Jewish cemetery with Jewish rights since he had
been raised a Jew. The police have ruled it accidental death due to the
alcohol content of his blood, but the insurance company comes sniffing
around making noises about suicide and the suicide clause in his policy.
And if he had killed himself, his burial in the Jewish cemetery would
make the rest of the land “unclean” which really ticks off an elderly
Orthodox Jew who’s wife is buried there and who is also about to donate a
pile of money for a new chapel addition to the synagogue. It gets much
more convoluted and complex from there but the upshot is that Rabbi Small
must figure out if it was suicide, accidental death or murder. And he
uses Talmudic logic to work his way thru the puzzle.

I whipped right thru this one. The reading is easy and the story moves
along fast enough to keep the pages turning without losing any detail in
the process. I found the details about the Jewish faith and customs to be
interesting as well and was amused to find that Synagogue politics and
Church politics, as depicted by Trollope, are not all that different. I
may have to look for more of these to keep on hand when I need a good,
light book.