Murder Under the Fig Tree by Kate Raphael; She Writes Press, $16.95
Rania, the Palestinian detective at the beating heart of Kate Raphael's "Murder Under the Fig Tree," is languishing in prison as the novel opens. She hasn't been charged. She hasn't had a hearing. But secrets she unearthed in the first book of Raphael's series threaten a war hero's reputation, and Israelis in high places want her silenced.
Raphael, already an influential activist in San Francisco's queer community when she joined ACT UP in the late 1980s, is well-practiced at disrupting the tranquility of the highly-placed. It seems natural, almost inevitable, that her protagonist declines to let sleeping injustice lie. The author's 18 months volunteering with the International Women's Peace Service in the West Bank equipped her to leaven the Palestine Mysteries with rich experience, and in this aspect her latest novel is opulent. It's worth mentioning that Raphael's work with IWPS also led to her election as Grand Marshal of 2004's SF Pride Parade.
Weeks after Rania's arrest, the detective is suddenly released. Was she let go because Chloe, her Jewish-American peace-activist ally, pulled the right strings? Or was she was freed because an Israeli policeman aims to turn her into a collaborator? Rania's return home is tainted by uncertainty, and complicated by recent electoral gains of Hamas, her own Fatah party's bitter rival. Her community now doubts the detective's loyalties. Captain Mustafa, her old boss, can't or won't allow her to return to her job.
Meanwhile, Chloe meets Daoud, a young man wearing "a long, heavily embroidered scarf draped around his throat like a feather boa," presiding over a coterie of gay Palestinians in a Jerusalem restaurant. Daoud asks Chloe to marry him the moment he learns she's from San Francisco, a city whose mere mention causes the young men to swoon. But when Chloe and her Palestinian girlfriend visit a queer club in Jerusalem several days later, she discovers that Daoud, a star drag performer there, has been killed in the West Bank village where he lives.
His neighbors believe Daoud was shot by Israeli soldiers, but Rania isn't sure their accounts add up. Blunt and often impulsive, Rania won't be turned from her pursuit of truth by social expectation and cultural constraint. Yes, she resists the notion that Daoud might have been targeted because he was gay: "But we don't have people like that in Palestine," she protests to Chloe, not knowing yet that her American friend is a lesbian. A lesbian with a Palestinian girlfriend, no less. But Rania is exactly the type to wrestle free of her own blinders once they are called to her attention.
And so the investigation begins, hobbled by Rania's unofficial status and obscured by the secrecy blanketing queer life in Palestine. Raphael gives readers an intricate plot, well-suited to the signature spice she adds to her mysteries. By immersing readers in the quotidian complexities of life in the occupied West Bank - subtleties rarely discernable in English-language newspaper accounts - the author maps a world as she unravels a murder. In portrayals of rank-and-file contention between Fatah loyalists and recently-empowered members of Hamas in 2006, when the novel is set, Raphael's fiction gives a human feel and street-level insight to readers tracking the parties' recently signed unity agreement.
Depiction of Palestinian life in "Murder Under the Bridge" can be simple and amusing. How does a policewoman brought up on Arabic coffee experience her first cappuccino? What happens when a hungry Palestinian, acculturated to ritually refuse a proffered meal before tucking in, politely declines - only to be taken at face value by her Israeli hosts?
The novel unfolds in a culturescape that can also be complicated, even sobering. How do Palestinian queers manage aspects of identity they are forced to conceal from family, friends, and even lovers? Not only sexuality, which must be hidden from countrymen who refuse to accept that Palestine includes "people like that." But when they cross into Israel to safely meet in support groups, or to visit queer bars, it becomes necessary to suppress natural, inescapable resentment of Palestine's occupation. There's no room to express fury at their people's humiliation and privation when Israeli club kids -- including armed and uniformed soldiers -- are cheering for Palestinian performers who have managed to smuggle themselves past the border.
A reader is unlikely to finger Daoud's murderer before Rania cracks the case, but Raphael manages to raise the stakes even after the mystery is solved: justice is served in a manner that will strike most western readers as strange, even baffling. This complexity, too, is worth savoring. The author paves a nuanced path through her characters' lives and milieu, leading readers toward understanding, and perhaps even acceptance, of her mystery's unconventional denouement.