{"id":7812,"date":"2019-03-11T08:14:53","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T12:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7812"},"modified":"2019-03-11T08:15:02","modified_gmt":"2019-03-11T12:15:02","slug":"a-long-night-in-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7812","title":{"rendered":"****A Long Night in Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Written by Dov Alfon, translated by Daniella Zamir \u2013 Lots of action is packed into Dov Alfon\u2019s debut novel, A Long Night in Paris<\/a><\/em>, Israel\u2019s bestselling book of 2016-2017, now available in English. It\u2019s hard to believe so much can happen in little more than twenty-four hours! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story begins one morning when a gregarious Israeli\nsoftware engineer disappears from the arrivals hall of Charles de Gaulle\nAirport. An irrepressible flirt, he peels off from a group of colleagues to\nlink up with a beautiful blonde before the two seemingly disappear into thin\nair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Police Commissaire Jules L\u00e9ger grudgingly organizes an\ninvestigation, predictably hampered by too many cooks: airport security, the\nIsraeli police representative for Europe, a mysterious Israeli security colonel\nnamed Zeev Abadi, and, most uncooperative of all, El Al security. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abadi is a Tunisian Jew raised in the Paris suburbs. Not until midnight does he assume his official role as the new head of Israeli intelligence\u2019s SIGINT unit. Temporarily in charge of the unit back in Tel Aviv, with minuscule bureaucratic power, is Lieutenant Oriana Talmor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the airport, Abadi uncovers footage showing the hapless\nIsraeli attacked by a pair of Chinese thugs and thrown into a sewer pit where\nsurvival is impossible. Abadi soon realizes the attack was a case of mistaken\nidentity. He must figure out who was the actual intended victim and calls on Talmor\nher team back in Israel for help. Separated by more than two thousand miles,\nthe two try to uncover the identity of the intended victim, his current\nlocation, and the reasons he\u2019s a murder target.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although most of the short chapters are written from the\npoint of view of Abadi, Talmor, or L\u00e9ger, some are from clueless higher-ups in\nthe Israeli and French governments, the various criminal operatives involved,\nand the real quarry of the killers, a young man named Vladislav Yerminski. What\nyou mostly learn about him is that he\u2019s checked into an expensive hotel with a\nsuitcase full of electronic gadgetry. (I forget how that bag got through Tel\nAviv\u2019s airport security, if I ever knew.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a multinational cast of characters and you\u2019re well\nalong before you realize what game Yerminski is playing and who\u2019s behind the\nmysterious gang of Chinese pursuing him. All the bureaucrats are busy trying to\nspin the first victim\u2019s undignified death in a way that masks the shortcomings\nand errors in their own intelligence work. Even though I couldn\u2019t quite believe\nin the criminal mastermind whose Chinese assassins murdered the wrong man, I\ntotally believed that they work in a rogue system that does not tolerate error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alfon came to the writing of this book with the perfect\nresume. He knows Paris, having been born and raised there. He is himself a\nformer intelligence officer in the Israeli Intelligence Corps\u2019 Unit 8200, which\nis responsible for signals intelligence (SIGINT) and code decryption. His\npolitical acumen was honed as a former cultural observer and editor in chief of\nIsrael\u2019s major newspaper, Ha\u2019aretz<\/em>,\nand he served as an editor for Israel\u2019s largest publishing house. The\ntranslation flows smoothly as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Written by Dov Alfon, translated by Daniella Zamir \u2013 Lots of action is packed into Dov Alfon\u2019s debut novel, A Long Night in Paris, Israel\u2019s bestselling book of 2016-2017, now available in English. It\u2019s hard to believe so much can … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****A Long Night in Paris - bestselling Israeli thriller that takes off from the first chapter and never stops!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[440,52,54,193,126,32],"tags":[1521,1522,1494,1320],"class_list":["post-7812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-crime","category-detective","category-espionage","category-reading-2","category-thriller","tag-a-long-night-in-paris","tag-dov-alfon","tag-israel","tag-paris"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-220","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7812"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7814,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7812\/revisions\/7814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}