Mystery, Cozy Mystery

Welcome to New York in the 1980s, where the best thing about being obsessed with real estate is that you can count on it to arise in conversation about every ten minutes. Nina Fischman mostly opts out of those She's too busy running down to Housing Court on behalf of her poverty law clients, and tracking down sales on sweaters that camouflage the hips. But Nina's mother, Ida, has a nose for the market, and that nose gets twitchy when old ladies in her neighborhood start dying, leaving apartments that have miraculously escaped what New Yorkers delicately call "the cockroach problem." Someone's making a killing in real estate.

This collection of books featuring Jewish main characters is decidedly non-comprehensive. As we come across books that are described as having Jewish main characters, we add them to this database. The creators of the Jewish Genre Reading Challenge have not read all (or even most) of the books in this database. We have gathered information from many sources and not all may be accurate. Inclusion of a book in our database does not imply endorsement or approval. There is always the possibility that antisemitism may be present in a book, either written into a character's experience or through malicious or ignorant caricature or stereotypical portrayal of Jewish characters and culture. Please take care of yourselves as you read. 

PLEASE let us know if you encounter a book in this database that does not have a Jewish main character, if you have corrections or additions for a book's genre categories, or if you have any other concerns about the inclusion of a particular book in this database.