Decree of Heaven

A powerful novel of revenge and redemption across generations by an acclaimed suspense novelist.

In March 1920, sixteen-year-old Jacob Evanovich survives the burning of his Ukrainian shtetl by hiding in the mud beneath its synagogue. By morning he is the only one of his family left alive, with a dead commissar's pistol, a copper pendant, and a four-hundred-kilometer walk to the sea.

What follows is a century of vigilance. Jacob becomes the deadliest shot in the Haganah, a man who will swear allegiance to no one but a Jewish state not yet born. His son Isaac, raised by neighbors who never tell him the whole truth, becomes a gifted linguist and photographer, until one night at a Munich airfield puts a long lens in his hands and a vow in his heart. And Isaac's son Zev carries both legacies, along with a plate in his skull and a temper he can't always control.

When a stranger appears at Zev's suburban New York door with the weathered bag his grandfather carried out of Ukraine, a missing man, a murdered pilot, and a ghost settlement in the Moroccan Sahara pull him toward the one fight his family never finished.

Spanning pogrom and partition, Munich and Beirut, The Decree of Heaven is a tense and unsparing saga of three generations bound by loss, loyalty, and a debt of blood. Some call it fate. Jacob's friends called it bashert.