We Would Never
By Tova Mirvis (Avid Reader Press)

“I watch the video in the middle of the night,” begins Tova Mirvis’s new novel, as Hailey Marcus Gelman watches online coverage of a woman being interrogated about the murder of her husband. When the woman admits that they had been in the middle of a contentious divorce, the police officer questions her alibi. The officer then asks if she knows anyone who might have tried to help her harm him. “No one I know would ever do something so awful,” she insists.

Hailey closes her laptop, thinking, “It’s impossible to believe that the woman on the screen is me.”

Nevertheless, it is her husband, Jonah Gelman, a novelist and professor, who has been shot in his upstate New York home. Five months later, Hailey is revisiting the crime from Bangor, Maine, where she and her young daughter, Maya, shelter with her brother Adam, the Marcus family outcast.

The novel shifts between the story of Hailey and Jonah’s deteriorating marriage and the months since the murder. In alternating chapters, Mirvis explores members of Hailey’s close-knit family: her mother, Sherry—is she domineering or just loving?; her father, Solomon—the family patriarch and a successful dermatologist now sidelined with Parkinson’s; and her protective oldest brother, Nate—a dermatologist in business with his father who still yearns to be appreciated.

Hailey’s family hovers over her bitter and drawn-out divorce negotiations. She wants to move to Florida with Maya to be near her family, but Jonah refuses, threatening to dredge up the mysterious scandal that caused Adam’s estrangement. Sherry, meanwhile, is desperate to protect her family’s privacy and free her daughter from the grasp of a man she sees as hateful.

Mirvis drops enough hints to keep readers guessing. When Sherry bemoans that Jonah will torment Hailey forever, Nate says, “You should kill him.” Is he joking? And why does Hailey feel a need to confess? Then there are the sketchy characters connected to Nate and Solomon’s dermatology practice, including office manager Tara, her boyfriend, Kevin, and his brother Sam. Would any of them be willing to kill for money?

Yet the book is more than a whodunnit. Mirvis’s characters are multidimensional, wrestling with doubts and guilt, not just about murder, but also about a lifetime of questionable choices.

According to an interview in Publishers Weekly, Mirvis’s novel was inspired by the true story of the murder of a professor in Florida that Mirvis had read about when she herself was going through a divorce and leaving Orthodox Judaism—likely the murder of law professor Dan Markel, though Mirvis does not name the case in the interview.

While her earlier novels, including the best seller The Ladies Auxiliary, were set in the Orthodox world of her youth, the Marcus family of We Would Never is secular. Nevertheless, Judaism remains an underlying thread in the novel: At Yom Kippur services, Sherry searches the liturgy for answers. Can a good person commit murder? Can a murderer ever be forgiven by man or by God?

The combination of murder mystery and character-driven literary fiction makes the perfect read for a winter snowstorm or beach vacation. Long after finishing the book, you’ll be left pondering if the mere contemplation of murder reveals something significant about a person’s morality.

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer, poet and book reviewer living in Connecticut.