INVISIBLE CITY

(Faber £7.99)

WHEN this novel was first published in the U. S., it became an instant success, and was followed rapidly by two more books featuring trainee new York Tribune reporter Rebekah Roberts.

This is magnificent story-telling set against the backdrop of a closed, secretive community of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn — exactly the same neighbourhood in which Rebekah’s own mother, who abandoned her when she was a baby, was brought up.

Those two strands of the story coalesce, but it opens with the discovery of a woman’s naked body in a scrap yard.

The corpse is then spirited away by the community’s undertakers and is set to be buried without a post-mortem examination. Roberts is determined to get to the bottom of who killed the woman, who turns out to have been married to one of the most significant figures in the Hasidic community.