Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
Simply put, if one dares to simplify such a tangled skein of sex and social dysfunction, The Wolf Hunt hinges on two violent deaths.
The first death is blatant and horrible. A black youth with a machete walks into a synagogue in Silicon Valley and kills a Jewish girl. Shortly after the attack Jamal, a poor black teen-ager, collapses and dies at a white party. There are rumours of foul play and suspicion falls on Adam, the son of Israeli immigrants.
Adam’s father, Michael, is vice president of a global company, his mother is Lilach: an earth mother in couture frocks who volunteers at a care home for under-privileged oldies. It’s Lilach who is the narrator here, the story revealed with transparent objectivity from the time of the couple’s arrival in the new country eighteen years ago to the present where Michael is close to the top of the tree, his family living the American dream. They have it all: the house, the pool, winter skiing at Tahoe, summer on Mexican beaches, nostalgic visits to relations back home on a kibbutz …. where cracks in the dream become obvious. Adam’s twin cousins, training to be combat troops, are fiercely macho, scornful of what they maintain is the ovine mentality of those American Israelis who stood by and did nothing when a boy walked into a synagogue with a machete and killed a girl.
Born and bred in the United States, attending a good American school, speaking English with his friends, Hebrew at home, trailing his fiery cousins, Adam is starting to question his identity. However, Lilach keeps a wary watch on him although Michael, the workaholic, is untroubled – this is merely teen-age angst - and then Adam goes to a party and the world implodes.
The autopsy shows that Jamal died from a meths overdose. He was a bully but no druggie so someone could, must have spiked his drink. Adam had a chemistry set in his garage; he had been researching meths on his computer, and he was one of Jamal’s victims. Circumstantial evidence is cited, refuted, dismissed, and Adam cleared - but only by the police. In the community at large there is a miasma of suspicion; but where vandals merely scrawl graffiti and break windows there is an air of menace in Lilach’s fraught encounters with the women, always recorded precisely in her scoured prose where fear lurks behind every line. And Lilach’s fear is compounded not only by the possibility that her son could be a murderer but by the compulsion to protect him at all costs, not only from the Law but from society.
Unexpected but timely a guardian angel appears. Uri, ex-soldier, reputed to be ex-Mossad, is a mystery figure who, as antisemitism surfaces targeting Adam and his family, arrives to protect them with a gang of boys he is training to fight, and to fight dirty. Adam is enthralled by Uri, even Michael is charmed, and Lilach, although torn between gratitude for the protection and doubts as to its method, is profoundly relieved. In the absence of Michael (so often away on business trips) there is no one else to turn to when a rock comes through the kitchen window, no man who can comfort Adam and bury his murdered dog, no one to comfort her.
This book goes straight for the jugular in a style that strips bare the narrator’s soul. The dialogue conforms, matched to every finely drawn character. The Wolf Hunt is an exposé of abuse from racism to patriarchism; it’s noble and devious, heart-warming, and cold as a glacier. It troubles the reader.
Translated by Sondra Silverston.
