Posted By  richards on September 26, 2014    
				
				The Golem Does Hollywood in Outlandish Tale            
      Joan Allen    
      Like Father, Like Golem: Jonathan and Jesse      Kellerman set their fanciful new thriller in Hollywood.    
     The Golem of Hollywood    By Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman    Putnam Adult, 560 pages, $27.95  
    Jonathan and Jesse Kellermans father-and-son opus, The Golem    of Hollywood, is as ambitious as it is completely ridiculous     and thats not altogether a bad thing. The novels protagonist    captures some of the storys scale and confusion: Jacob Lev is    a hard-drinking, twice-divorced    Harvard-dropout-turned-hardboiled-Los-Angeles-cop (got all    that?) whos already thoroughly washed up at the tender age of    31. But unlike most world-weary cops before him, Lev also    happens to be a lapsed Orthodox Jew, the son of a Talmud    scholar father and depressive artist mother. Its his religious    heritage, admittedly rare among cops, that gets him recruited    to a special branch of the LAPD on the same morning that he    wakes up with a mysterious  and, obviously, totally hot     woman.  
    Soon after this dream woman vanishes, Jacob is summoned to the    scene of a grisly murder, in an abandoned house in an    off-the-grid part of the Hollywood Hills. There, Jacob    discovers some vomit and a decapitated head that glistened    surreally, like a gag item fished from the ninety-nine-cent bin    at a novelty shop. Theres no body in sight, and the crime    scene is otherwise immaculate, but for the Hebrew word for    justice, tzedek, burned on the wall.  
    From this premise the father-and-son writing team spin a tale    spanning many millennia and several countries and countless    leaps of plausibility. If the story starts out unassuming    enough for this genre, with the usual details about the crime    and the spiked-coffee-swilling detectives character, the    authors suddenly lunge far, far back in time, all the way to    Cain and Abel, where we meet the forgotten sister of the first    family. (Its impossible to miss this transition, by the way,    because someone in production went all out and fake-aged the    pages to resemble biblical parchment.)  
    Cain and Abels sister Asham, we learn, is matchlessly    beautiful, and the source of great rivalry between the brothers     its the desire to win her, the authors imply, thats the    real motive for the first murder in history. As the    cold-hearted but compelling Cain implores his sister shortly    before bludgeoning Abel:  
    We could build a whole world together, he says.  
    The world already exists.  
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Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman Tell a Whopper With Everything in It
				
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