The 12th Commandment Lib/E

Swirling with secrets and their consequences, exploring how revelation and redemption might be accessed through sin, and driven through twists and turns toward a startling conclusion, The 12th Commandment is a brilliant novel by award-winning author Daniel Torday. The Dönme sect―a group of Jewish-Islamic adherents with ancient roots―lives in an isolated community on rural land outside of smalltown Mt. Izmir, Ohio. Self-sustaining, deeply-religious, and heavily-armed, they have followed their self-proclaimed prophet, Natan of Flatbush, from Brooklyn to this new land. But the brutal murder of Natan's teenage son throws their tight community into turmoil. When Zeke Leger, a thirty-year-old writer at a national magazine, arrives from New York for the funeral of a friend, he becomes intrigued by the case, and begins to report on the murder. His college girlfriend Johanna Franklin prosecuted the case, and believes it is closed. Before he knows it, Zeke becomes entangled in the conflict between the Dönme, suspicious local citizens, Johanna, and the law―with dangerous implications for his body and his soul.

About the Author :
Daniel Torday is the director of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. An author and former editor at Esquire magazine, he serves as an editor at the Kenyon Review. His short stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train, Harper Perennial's Fifty-Two Stories, Harvard Review, the New York Times, and the Kenyon Review. His novella, The Sensualist, won the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction.

Review :
The 12th Commandment is a one of-a-kind pleasure. A dark murder mystery full of surprises, but also a romantic comedy, but also a serious novel of ideas. Featuring a likable millennial journalist, a likable millennial prosecutor, and--only in America!--a cannabis-loving, assault rifle-toting, ultra-orthodox messianic Jewish cult on a commune in rural Ohio. And also: splendidly written. -- "Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century" Daniel Torday's third novel is a revelation, a page-turner with bursts of prophecy and poetry. The 12th Commandment feels like a genre unto itself--theological noir, Ohio gothic. Torday is such a sharp observer of the spaces where American communities overlap and where the secular and the sacred collide. It's thrilling to read one of my favorite writers doing something utterly, dazzlingly new. -- "Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!" What a wild, delightful and utterly insane book! The 12th Commandment is a gripping, profound, and utterly absorbing novel in which an investigation into a murder becomes an investigation into mysticism, community, drugs, and what we find when we push our minds to the very limit. -- "Phil Klay, author of Redeployment and Missionaries"