The Gonif

LA’s oldest and most unconventional Jewish gumshoe has returned to stop a heist before it happens in the exciting fifth installment of the Amos Parisman Mystery series!

To escape the predations of the Nazis, a rare two-hundred-year-old Torah is quietly smuggled out of a doomed North African Jewish community in the dead of night and put aboard a ship. Eventually, it makes its way to safety across the Atlantic. Generations after the war has ended, it resides in obscurity in a small, rundown Sephardic temple in Hollywood. The peace is shattered, however, when suddenly someone tries to break in and abscond with it.

Amos Parisman, a local, agnostic, aging gumshoe, is recruited to thwart the would-be burglar. This sets him off on a madcap plunge into the world of international art and antiquities, and the ruthless kind of people who will stop at nothing-not even murder--to own them.

The Gonif parses the difference between true wisdom and the coarse material world.

Andy Weinberger is the author of An Old Man’s Game, Reasons to Kill, The Kindness of Strangers, and Die Laughing. He is a longtime bookseller and the founder/owner of Readers’ Books in Sonoma, California. Born in New York, he grew up in the Los Angeles area and studied poetry and Chinese history at the University of New Mexico. He lives in Sonoma, where Readers’ Books continues to thrive.