The novel begins with the death of Mordechai “Mordy” Horowitz, an elderly, deeply religious man in the Orthodox Jewish community of Newstead Hills. One snowy December morning, his regular synagogue carpool friends—Sam Hirsch, Shlomo Tannenbaum, Max Rosen, and Irving Eisenberg—arrive at his house and become worried when he does not answer. Shlomo enters with a spare key and discovers Mordy hanging from an orange extension cord in the garage. The men are horrified not only by the death but by what suicide will mean for Mordy’s reputation, his family, and his religious burial. They find a typed suicide note, but Sam quietly takes it and tells the others not to mention it, even to their wives. Trying to preserve Mordy’s dignity, the men cut him down themselves, but lose control of the heavy body and accidentally drop him, causing his head to strike the concrete floor. The police and local coroner subsequently treat the death as an obvious suicide, and the community moves rapidly toward burial without an autopsy. The central character is Mordy’s niece Miriam “Mel” Horowitz, a thirty-nine-year-old police officer in New York who previously worked as a homicide detective in Baltimore. Mel is talented but self-destructive: she drinks heavily, smokes constantly, uses prescription drugs recreationally, has serious anger problems, and has recently been removed from normal police duty after violently intervening when she saw a man attacking his wife. Her commanding officer, Lieutenant Nikoleta “Papa” Papadopoulous, has just suspended her for thirty days with pay after learning that Mel still had alcohol in her bloodstream during that incident. Papa believes Mel is an alcoholic who is destroying her own career and urges her to attend AA. Almost immediately afterward, Mel learns that Uncle Mordy has killed himself. She refuses to believe it. Mordy was the person who had kept her alive after her own teenage suicide attempt, telling her that only God could decide when life ended and insisting, “Whatever happens, we hold onto life.” Although Mel has avoided Newstead Hills for more than twenty years, she returns for the funeral because Mordy’s death feels fundamentally wrong.
Her return also forces her to confront why she left. As a teenager, Mel had fallen in love with her best friend Rachel Hirsch, the daughter of Sam and Batsheva Hirsch. Their relationship became romantic, and Rachel encouraged Mel to write her a love letter. Rachel’s older brother Avrami found the letter, and Batsheva brought the matter to Rabbi Granatstein. The rabbi responded with a vicious public sermon condemning homosexuality as an abomination and a danger to the community. Faced with exposure and terrified of what would happen to her, Rachel denied their relationship and claimed that Mel had imagined everything. Mel’s family was devastated, and her father Chaim came to regard her sexuality as an illness or spiritual problem. When Chaim died suddenly only a short time later, Rabbi Granatstein told the grieving Mel to ask her father’s forgiveness, leaving her with the horrifying suggestion that she had somehow contributed to his death. She subsequently overdosed on Valium. Mordy, Chaim’s identical twin, sat beside her in the hospital and became the one family member who remained an unconditional source of love. This is why his supposed suicide is so difficult for her to accept. Once back in Newstead Hills, Mel begins conducting an unofficial investigation despite having no jurisdiction. She examines the garage and is disturbed to learn that her mother Harriet has scrubbed the floor with bleach. At the funeral home, she insists on seeing Mordy’s body and notices potentially significant details: multiple ligature marks around his neck, questionable discoloration, and an injury to his skull. She secretly consults her former medical-examiner colleague Serena Vargas, who tells her that a proper autopsy would normally be necessary to distinguish suicide from staging. Yet the authorities refuse to delay the burial, and Mel discovers the extraordinary conflict that the local funeral director, Jack Schreiber, is also the coroner. Mel also meets Detective Dani Russo, a Black female detective working with the local major-crimes unit. Dani agrees privately that an autopsy would have been appropriate, and a mutual attraction quickly develops between them. Mel and her PI friend Ryan even sneak into the funeral home at night, hoping to reopen Mordy’s coffin and examine him, but the traditional wooden casket has already been sealed and they cannot get inside without visibly damaging it. Mordy is buried, apparently taking the physical evidence with him.
Mel nevertheless finds evidence that makes the suicide both more convincing and more suspicious. Mordy had recently been prescribed an antidepressant, although a pharmacist tells her there is no obvious drug interaction that would explain the death. His computer contains searches from the night he died about suicide, hanging, and writing a suicide note. But when Mel dusts the keyboard, it appears to have been wiped clean before she touched it. Mordy’s leather appointment diary is missing. Then Dani secretly tells Mel that there actually was a suicide note, but the men who discovered Mordy persuaded the police to omit it from the official report. Mel tracks the note to Sam Hirsch. In it, Mordy supposedly confesses that he has sinned, “taken what wasn’t mine,” betrayed his traditions, and brought shame on himself and his family. Sam then reveals that money has been disappearing from Hirsch & Sons, the successful kosher-meat business where Mordy was chief financial officer. Large transfers were made to a mysterious company called Petek Holdings, and because Mordy controlled the accounts, it appears that he may have been embezzling. A possible motive emerges: Mordy’s son Ezra is a severe drug addict who has gone through numerous expensive rehabs and repeatedly demanded money from his father. Mel considers whether Mordy stole to support Ezra and killed himself from shame, or whether Ezra murdered him for his inheritance. Ezra is unstable and desperate, but Mel eventually finds him near an overdose and realizes that, whatever his failings, his grief and guilt are genuine. Meanwhile, Mordy’s missing diary suddenly reappears in a place Mel had already searched. Pages have been torn out, but indentations reveal appointments, including a planned dinner with Mel and a mysterious meeting with someone named “Shira.” The fact that Mordy was making future plans again argues against suicide. Mel also discovers that he had been visiting Christ Church and Silver Pines, a rehabilitation center, and that shortly before his death he had been investigating irregularities involving local grocer Noam Goldberg. That becomes another apparent lead, but it turns out to be a separate scandal: Noam has secretly been buying cheaper nonkosher chicken and selling it as kosher to cover his financial problems. Mordy had begun noticing discrepancies in his orders. Noam is dishonest, but not Mordy’s killer.
