In Shimon Adafs Lost Detective Trilogy what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning Both profound and compulsively readable these books demand to be devoured Lavie Tidhar author of By Force AloneIn A Detectives Complaint the sequel to One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset Elish Ben Zaken has traded working as a private investigator for writing detective novels based on unsolved cases from the past He appears to live an ordinary writers life meeting with his agent attending literary conferences But all is not quite right with Elish who cannot escape his past so easily especially when his sisters daughter Tahel a teenager and an aspiring sleuth herself calls on him for help Tahel has uncovered a mystery a young woman boarded a bus in Beersheva on a Thursday evening and stepped off in Sderot close to the Gaza border on Sunday evening A bus ride that should have lasted an hour instead took three days and the young woman remembers none of itTo assist Taheland he tells himself to conduct research for his next novelElish moves back to Sderot where he grew up His sister Yaffa has moved her family from Tel Aviv to a new lakeside development there the property came cheap despite the attractive setting and there are murmurs that the developer fled the country before it was completed Some of the houses still stand empty and Tahel keeps waking up at night to find her mother staring out at the lake convinced she is being watched Now in the summer of 2014 Sderot lies near the center of the GazaIsrael conflict and sirens and missile strikes are part of the towns daily realityas are violent clashes between antiwar protestors and those who oppose them In this pressurized environment Elish must grapple with the deep wounds of history both personal and political and the human need for answers in a world that offers few