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Amos Parisman Mystery #5
The Gonif
LA’s oldest and most unconventional Jewish gumshoe has returned to stop a heist before it happens in the exciting fifth installment of the Amos Parisman Mystery series!
To escape the predations of the Nazis, a rare two-hundred-year-old Torah is quietly smuggled out of a doomed North African Jewish community in the dead of night and put aboard a ship. Eventually, it makes its way to safety across the Atlantic. Generations after the war has ended, it resides in obscurity in a small, rundown Sephardic temple in Hollywood. The peace is shattered, however, when suddenly someone tries to break in and abscond with it.
Amos Parisman, a local, agnostic, aging gumshoe, is recruited to thwart the would-be burglar. This sets him off on a madcap plunge into the world of international art and antiquities, and the ruthless kind of people who will stop at nothing—not even murder—to own them.
The Gonif parses the difference between true wisdom and the coarse material world.
To escape the predations of the Nazis, a rare two-hundred-year-old Torah is quietly smuggled out of a doomed North African Jewish community in the dead of night and put aboard a ship. Eventually, it makes its way to safety across the Atlantic. Generations after the war has ended, it resides in obscurity in a small, rundown Sephardic temple in Hollywood. The peace is shattered, however, when suddenly someone tries to break in and abscond with it.
Amos Parisman, a local, agnostic, aging gumshoe, is recruited to thwart the would-be burglar. This sets him off on a madcap plunge into the world of international art and antiquities, and the ruthless kind of people who will stop at nothing—not even murder—to own them.
The Gonif parses the difference between true wisdom and the coarse material world.
- GenresMystery
260 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 19, 2024
6 people are currently reading
14 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 24, 2025
Deciding whether a novel qualifies as a thriller or a mystery isn’t always easy. A novel that features police officers or private detectives usually falls into the mystery, who-dun-it category. Other popular mysteries feature amateur detectives who manage to cleverly determine who committed the crime. (The overwhelming majority of mysteries include a death, but not all.) However, the best of them also contain a certain amount of suspense, or readers would lose interest. Thrillers, on the other hand, place their characters in danger, leaving them struggling to survive. The cause of that danger is often only discovered toward the end of the novel, which does give readers a mystery to solve. Two recent works show how these categories can overlap: “The Safari” by Jaclyn Goldis (Emily Bestler Books) is definitely a thriller, but also offers a who-dun-it aspect, while “The Gonif: An Amos Parisman Mystery” by Andy Weinberger (Prospect Park Book) features a private eye, but also offers some of the same suspense as a thriller. See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/book...
June 14, 2025
Amos is back, searching for a stolen Torah and getting into a mess of a case. This is the 5th book in the series but takes place earlier in Amos’s life.
October 19, 2025
Meh! I spotted this while browsing at my local library. I was attracted to the Yiddish title. A lot of characters but not a lot of depth to the story.
March 1, 2025
Semiretired detective Amos Parisman is hired to find the gonif (thief, scoundrel) who tried to steal a 200-year-old Torah from a small Los Angeles synagogue, and complications ensue. I enjoyed this 5th entry in the series, by the owner of Sonoma’s local bookstore, and its returning characters: Parisman’s wife Loretta (who is losing her mind), housekeeper/caregiver Carmen, assistant/backup Omar, cousin Shelly, LAPD friend Bill Malloy, and the streets of LA.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews