Run You Down: A Rebekah Roberts Novel
Written by Julia Dahl
Narrated by Andi Arndt
4/5
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About this audiobook
Aviva Kagan was a just a teenager when she left her Hasidic Jewish life in Brooklyn for a fling with a smiling college boy from Florida-and then disappeared. Twenty-three years later, the child she walked away from is a NYC tabloid reporter named Rebekah Roberts. And Rebekah isn't sure she wants her mother back in her life.
But when a man from the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Roseville, N.Y. contacts Rebekah about his young wife's mysterious death, she is drawn back into Aviva's world. Pessie Goldin's body was found in her bathtub, and while her parents want to believe it was an accident, her husband is certain she was murdered.
Once she starts poking around, Rebekah encounters a whole society of people who have wandered "off the path" of ultra-Orthodox Judaism-just like her mother. But some went with dark secrets, and rage at the insular community they left behind.
In the sequel to her Edgar Award finalist Invisible City, Julia Dahl has created a taut mystery that is both a window into a secretive culture and an exploration of the demons we inherit.
Julia Dahl
Julia Dahl is the author of Conviction, Run You Down, and Invisible City, which was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, one of the Boston Globe’s Best Books of 2014, and has been translated into eight languages. A former reporter for CBS News and the New York Post, she now teaches journalism at NYU.
Related to Run You Down
Titles in the series (3)
Invisible City: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Run You Down: A Rebekah Roberts Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Conviction: A Rebekah Roberts Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Run You Down
45 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Run You Down – GrippingRun You Down is the follow up to the successful debut Invisible City by Julia Dahl, and she does not let you down. The great thing about this book is that you do not need to have read the previous book to enjoy this, it is an excellent standalone thriller.Aviva Kagan, a teenage Hasidic Jew wants out of the restrictive life, she wants to live, she wants to escape everything about the community. Aviva is in love with a college boy, Brian and they are in love. They run away to Florida to where he is studying, but Aviva has finally escaped Brooklyn and her community. When she gives birth, she knows she cannot cope with being a parent and runs away leaving behind her daughter, Rebekah.Twenty three years later Rebekah is a reporter with the New York Tribune, and making quite a name for herself, especially looking at the religious communities, and the secrets they hold. When an ultra-Orthodox Jew approaches Rebekah with the story of his wife’s death and he thinks she has been murdered and nobody cares.Little does Rebekah know that she is being drawn into a world her mother did so much to escape. While at the same time, she finds that White Supremacists might be involved in the story and a long lost uncle. She cannot get her head around the story at first, and for the first time she reaches out to her mother, and a world she does not understand.Julia Dahl has written a great thriller, that crosses the bounds of New York States Jewish communities, White Supremacists and the politics involved. With a deft touch, she writes about race, religion and politics in New York, without preaching. An excellent and believable thriller that is gripping.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Journalist Rebekah is struggling to put her life back together after the trauma she experienced in Invisible City, and she's just coasting at work until a call comes in about another possible murder in an orthodox community just north of New York. It turns out that there are even more possible connections with her mother, who disappeared from Rebekah's life when she was an infant. Alternating chapters are from the mother's point of view, and shed some light on the present day murder. Readers will be pleased with the satisfying ending.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Read 9/16. Second in series after Invisible City. After the first excellent novel, Dahl manages to produce another well written and engaging mystery involving her reporter/investigator Rebekah, set in the NY Hasidic community. Alternating chapters by Rebekah and her mother, a sometimes questionable technique, was nicely managed by Dahl. Her writing skills suggest that novels to come should be worthwhile.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Another winner from the award winning first novel author of INVISIBLE CITY. (See my review). After closing the final page of that book and immediately picked up RUN YOU DOWN. Rebekah is given a message from her mother whom she has never met...except as a very young infant. In her search for her mother, Aviva she enters into the world of "off the path" lives and struggles of former ultra-conservative Orthodox Jews. A young Orthodox Jewish man is convinced his wife was murdered and not a suicide. As Rebekah is drawn into the mystery she understands and gets closer to her mother. The first chapters in the book alternates between letters to Aviva to her abandoned daughter and Rebekah's search. Read both books in order. You are in for a real treat.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Second in the series featuring a daughter of an Orthodox Jewish mother and a minister father. Rebekah works as a reporter in NYC and, through contacts she has developed in the Orthodox community, is called in to investigate the death of a young mother. This is a rare instance of the sequel besting the original. Great characters, a twisty plot, and the involvement of her own family make this a well-written, highly suspenseful read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I didn’t think it would be possible for the second book in this series to live up to the first, which is a compelling personal story, a suspenseful mystery, and one of my favorite novels of 2014, but this new book by Julia Dahl is at least as gripping as her debut. At the end of the previous novel Rebekah learns that her long lost mother would like to talk, but when this one opens several months later Rebekah still hasn’t been able to get herself to give her mother a call. Aviva Kagan was a troubled teenager when she left her Hasidic Jewish life in Brooklyn, ran off with a non-Jewish college boy, gave birth to Rebekah, and then fled to parts unknown, leaving her fiancé and infant daughter behind. Rebekah is working her dream job as a journalist, but coping with anxiety (long term) and depression (new) is affecting her reporting skills and threatening to derail the career progress she’s made. When she’s contacted by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who hopes she’ll look into why his wife’s suspicious death hasn’t been investigated so she can write an article to prod the police, Rebekah gets involved with the insular religious community her mother grew up in and finds herself investigating a group of white supremacists.For the first two-thirds of the novel Rebekah’s mother recounts her life to explain her actions in chapters that alternate with Rebekah in the present day until the two plotlines begin to converge. I was equally drawn to the stories of both women, and it’s all written so realistically and set so convincingly in a timeline of real events that it’s easy to get swept up. Characters with varied levels of religious belief and disbelief are all portrayed with insight and sympathy, and are allowed shortcomings as well as strengths. It’s a disquieting but potent story and I’m looking forward to the next book in the series.