No-thrill thriller

The Man Who Wanted to Know (riverrun, £20), the third in the series of D. A. Mishani’s Superintendent Avraham Avraham novels, translated by Todd Hasak-Lowy, sees the Tel Aviv detective investigating his first murder case.

A 60-year-old woman has been strangled in her apartment, and the only clue is that a mystery policeman was in the building at the time of death.

Except Mishani doesn’t really do mystery, at least not the whodunnit kind. It’s not too long into the book before any reasonably alert reader can identify the probable killer.

A big clue lies in the way the story is told. The chapters alternate between Avraham’s perspective and that of Mali Bengtson,athirtysomethingbankworker, who has been the victim of a rape.

In Avraham’s chapters, the police inch towards uncovering the murderer through a combination of good detective work, chance and luck. But Avraham has many moments of doubt. Can he handle a homicide case? Can he trust his team? Can he resist pressure from his boss to follow a lead he believes is a red herring. In Mali’s chapters, she becomes increasingly suspicious that her husband may somehow be involved in the crime.

There’s little suspense and no thrills. But I suspect that’s not Mishani’s game either. He writes in such a cool, onepaced style that there’s no sense of tension as the police close in on their man. The most dramatic moment in the book is underplayed, its aftermath described rather than the actual event.

So what is his game? Superintendent Avraham is central. The story spends a lot of time in his head. If you buy into him — his anxiety about the case, and his relationship with his girlfriend Marienka, who has arrived from Brussels to live with him — then it works.

There’s also powerful insight into the emotional and pyschological damage caused by rape. And the setting is well described with lots of street names, details about the city’s buildlings, the beach and climate. The control of the alternating narrative is impressive, too, with two distinct voices emerging.

Mishani is a student of the detective fiction genre — he was formerly an editor working on crime novels. And he can’t resist a swipe at the competition. Avraham and Marienka are fans of The Bridge, one of the most popular “Nordic noir” crime series.

But when Avraham is struggling to make headway in his case, he finds he can no longer watch the programme: “The last thing he wanted was to see were detectives who knew everything.”

“Those Swedish and Danish cops, they’re not real,” Mishani seems to be saying. “My steady, plodding Israelis show what police work really is.”