A Strange Death

During World War I, the head of a British spy ring in a Jewish colony in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, the beautiful Sarah Aaronsohn, killed herself. When the ring was broken by the Turks, leaving behind a letter in which she asked to be avenged. Was she? And what did this have to do with the spectacle of four women who ran through the town, jeering and cursing the arrested spies as though let loose from "an infernal world of Gorgons and Furies?" A Strange Death is the answer to this. But it is many other things, too. A tantalizing murder mystery. A lyrical evocation of an Israeli town in the 1970s and of its old farming population, the descendants of the colonists who founded it in 1882. The story of an American couple that romantically settled there and of what they found. And last but not least the question: Was there a path not taken from those days to ours that might have made all the difference?