The Red Balcony

"In 1933, Ivor Castle, an Oxford-educated Jew, arrives in Palestine to take up a position as assistant to the defense counsel for the two men accused of murdering Haim Arlosoroff, a figure whose tactics to get Jews out of Hitler's Germany and into Palestine were controversial enough to get him killed. Ivor, an innocent to the politics of the case, falls into bed and deeply in love with Tsiona, a free-spirited painter who sketched the accused men in a Jerusalem cafe on the night of the murder and may be a key witness. As Ivor learns the hard way about the violence simmering just under the lid of British colonial rule, Wilson dazzles with his mastery of the sun-baked scenery and the subtleties of the warring agendas in Palestine. Ivor moves between the crime scene in Jaffa and the maze of Jerusalem, between the mounting mysteries around this notorious legal case and clandestine lovemaking in Tsiona's tiny studio in Safed. In the end, he must discover where his heart lies-whether he cares more for the law or the truth, whether he is an Englishman or a Jew, with whom and where he belongs"--