A Strange Death: A Story Originating in Espionage, Betrayal, and Vengeance in a Village in Old Palestine Hillel Halkin During World War I, the head of a British spy ring in a Jewish colony in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, the beautiful Sarah Aaronsohn, killed herself when the ring was broken by the Turks, leaving behind a letter in which she asked to be avenged. Was she? And what did this have to do with the spectacle of four women who ran through the town, jeering and cursing the arrested spies as though let loose form "an infernal world of Gorgons and Furies?" A Strange Death is the answer to this. But it is many other things, too. A tantalizing murder mystery. A lyrical evocation of an Israeli town in the 1970s and of its old farming population, the descendants of the colonists who founded it in 1882. The story of an American couple that romantically settled there and of what they found. A cat-and-mouse game (but who is the cat and who the mouse?) with an elusive figure, the town story-teller - the one man who may know the truth - and won't admit it. A wry meditation on fact and fiction, memory and invention. An exploration of a little-known period in early Zionist history when the rivalry of Jews and Arabs for the prize of Palestine was still "magically benign". And last but not least the question: Was there a path not taken from those days to ours that might have made all the difference? Hillel Halkin is an author, critic, and well-known translator whose journalism and essays from Israel have regularly appeared in Commentary, The New Republic, and The New York Sun, for over thirty years. His first book, Letters to an American Jewish Friend, the recipient of a National Jewish Book Award, caused spirited controversy. His much-acclaimed Across The Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel, received the 2002 Lucy Dawidowicz Prize for the writing of history.