Elish Ben Zaken, the mysterious hero of Shimon Adaf, left behind his work as a private investigator. Riddles no longer interest him. The existential questions that plagued him became background noise. He earns a living by writing detective books, based on unsolved past cases. He lives a seemingly balanced life. But can a man like Elish escape the vicious circle of mystery and detective that constantly spawn each other? And can he recover from his touch of destruction? It seems not. He came to the aid of Tahel, his niece, who intervenes in an investigation not hers: a young woman gets on a bus leaving Beer Sheva on Thursday evening. She gets off it on Sunday in the evening in Sderot. The three days she was absent were erased from her memory. She does not know where she spent them. For her, only one hour had passed in which she traveled by bus. In order to make progress in deciphering the mystery, Elish moves to live in Sderot. This is in the middle of the summer of 2014, in a war zone full of fear and hatred. It seems that there is nothing less pressing than solving the mystery that unfolded before him. But for Elish, the strange case of disappearance is an opportunity to re-examine deeper mysteries - the meaning of family life and the basic, uncontrollable human need for him, to look for mysteries and try to decipher them. Shimon Adaf, whose book Mox Nox won the Sapphire Prize for 2013, leads us in a detective's book through strange and beautiful routes, which connect the routine, dusty and heavenly world with other worlds, marked by flickers that are vague, alluring and dangerous in measure. Yigal Schwartz
