Rabbi David Small has become one of the most endearing sleuths in modern fiction. Irascible and compassionate, innocent and worldly wise, Rabbi Small can see the third side of any question, an exceptional talent he employs, along with Talmudic reasoning and insight, to solve the high crime of murder. This time the rabbi becomes involved in the mysterious death of an old man with many enemies, a death that intrigues and eventually fascinates both him and the town's chief of police, Hugh Lanigan.

The head of the English department at Boston's Windermere College is murdered and there is no shortage of people who might have done it. Professor Malcom Kent, the victim, was a philanderer, a Peeping Tom and a snob. Rabbi David Small, professor of Judaica at the college investigates, drawn into the case because a suspect is a fellow rabbi. By the author of The Day the Rabbi Resigned.

The seventh novel about the very lovable character of Rabbi Small, who employs the Jewish wit and wisdom to solve crimes.

Rabbi Benjamin's congregation presents him with a special holiday vest--and cooks him so much food that soon its buttons pop off. Includes glossary, notes on Jewish holidays, and recipes for special foods associated with them.

Scientist, mathematician, and court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, John Dee is also one of the sixteenth-century's most renowned alchemists, driven by a passion to fathom the elemental secrets of the cosmos. But when his reckless assistant, Edward Kelley, succeeds in using a crystal sphere to summon angels, Dee is catapulted into an awesome struggle that may extinguish the light of reason forever. One of the spirits invoked is a cunning demon who takes possession of Dee's young daughter, Katherine, and shows Dee a frightening vision of his own future. Terrified by what has been foretold, Dee abruptly decides to close his house in London and flee to Europe with his long-suffering wife, Jane, and their two young children. Their desperate flight brings them at last to the city of Prague--a center of culture, knowledge, and learning, both sacred and profane, a gateway between the Eastern and Western worlds, and also, it is whispered, a door between our world and the world of the spirits. There, in the city's ancient streets, Dee encounters the mystic Rabbi Judah Loew, who enlists his aid in the creation of a Golem--a man fashioned from the clay--to defend the city's Jewish Quarter from persecution. And he asks Dee's help to avert a impending crisis that threatens to engulf the world. For ancient legends say that the fate of the world rests on shoulders of thirty-six righteous men. And if one of those righteous men dies before his time, the world will end and dark spirits will remake it in their own image.

Mrs. Bloch, gathering with her friends at the local soda fountain each day tells the story of her son, a former rabbi and now a successful businessman

Presented in a series of conversations between grandmother Minnie Bloch and her companions, Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio commentator on All Things Considered, unfolds a layered family portrait of three generations of the Bloch family, whose members are collapsing under everyday burdens and brutal betrayals. Her son Manny is a renowned, almost legendary rabbi. Respected by his congregants and surrounded by family, no one suspects that he yearns for a life of greater personal glory, but when an oracular bird delivers what Manny believes to be a message from his deceased father, he abandons his congregation in pursuit of a life in business and his entire life spirals out of control. As Manny's fortunes rise in the corporate realm, he falls deeper into an affair with a congregant, a Holocaust survivor, his wife sinks deeper into alcoholism and depression and his daughter, traumatized by a sexual scandal at college, makes Manny the target of a plot to shatter his newly found empire. The devoted family matriarch, Minnie, observes and recounts the tragic downfall of her family, unable to save them from themselves.

Surrounded by cemeteries in the flatlands of New Jersey, the small town of Lud is sustained by the business of death. In fact, with no synagogue and no congregation, Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn has only one true responsibility: to preside over burial services for Jews who pass away in the surrounding cities. But after the Arctic misadventures that led him to Lud, he wouldn't want to live (or die) anywhere else. As the only living child in Lud, his daughter Connie has a different opinion of this grisly city, and she will do anything to get away from it--or at least liven it up a bit. Things get lively indeed when Connie testifies to meeting the Virgin Mary for a late-night romp through the local graveyards.

From 1946 through the 1970s, Rabbi David Hartman, Congregational minister Martin Cooper, and their wives maintain a friendship that withstands small-town prejudices and envies and larger turmoil