The Hasidic Trauma Unit

The novel takes place during the winter of 2011 in a Hassidic community in Montreal where Sender Pleskin, a self proclaimed trauma specialist, has been living for many years. His efforts to serve the community and to gently nudge it into modernity results in comic but serious mystery thriller. He lives with his wife who has one leg 6 inches shorter than the other and their 9 children. Sender is a Bubmer Hasid in his early forties, tall and handsome.
The novel opens during a blizzard in Montreal, January 2011. Sender's assistant parked his black Escalade ESV on St. Catherine street in front of the Octopussy Club, a strip joint on the fourth floor of a narrow, non-descript brick building. A long lit sign on a nude silhouette stood against the snow and wind over the deserted street below. Sender is searching for clues that might help explain the coma into which a 16 year old boy from the community, Mayer Weiss, has fallen into a deep coma. Sender follows various leads on a circuitous path which he interprets as Divine Providence.
Eventually Sender Pleskin is lead to an old British soldier with a complex history. Bolton was actually Lieutenant Colonel Roger Alexander Hariton who had served with British counter intelligence in Palestine during the War of Liberation and had confessed to the murder of a young Jewish man who had been transporting posters for the Irgun. Bolton was Hariton's brother-in-law who had been murdered by the Mossad in London by a mail bomb in 1947 in retaliation for the murder of the Jewish youth. Hariton lived in fear of the Mossad. In 1951 MI5 gave him the identity of his murdered brother-in-law and sent him off to Canada, where he found work in the mines of Northern Ontario, far from the reach of the Mossad.
When Sender had spent a year in a Jerusalem yeshiva in the mid eighties he had heard about the young orthodox hero who had been murdered during the War of Independence. It was now almost unbelievable that the same man who had murdered a Jewish boy 64 years ago was the main suspect in what appeared to be the attempted murder of Mayer Weiss in a hospital room.
Sender shaves off his beard and ear locks in order to assume a new identity that would allow him to befriend Colonel Hariton. Long conversations between them in a plush business lead to confession of the 64 year old crime and hints at involvement in the Mayer Weiss case. As Sender accompanies him into a subway station, he accidently steps on the old man's shoelace and he stumbles forward directly into the way of the slowing train. Hariton is killed and Sender is not a suspect. He leaves the station in confusion. The murderer had met his long overdue punishment but Sender was no closer to solving the mystery of Weiss' illness. When soon after the boy dies, Sender questions the purpose of the Trauma Unit.
The plot takes a turn when Sender receives a call from Donna Granger, Hariton's middle-aged daughter who lives in the Eastern Townships. A strange relationship develops between them which brings about his incarceration in a forest hideaway Hariton had built in the seventies to elude the Mossad. There Sender discovers the true Donna who had inherited her father's hatred for Jews. Her only son who had been killed in a winter motorcycle accident, suffering major brain injuries, had shared the same hospital room with Mayer Weiss before he fell into his coma.
Sender miraculously escapes and makes his way back to the Hasidic community from which he had been missing for a month. His beard and ear locks are gone. His very appearance is enough to convince the rabbis that he had gone astray. Only his wife stands by his side.