The man who knew Brecht

The Lake Rehoboth Community in Connecticut--originally a Jewish summer camp now home to a mix of old-line Commies, red-diaper babies, and more recent Russian émigrés--serves as the backdrop for this mystery. When the chairman of the community board, free-thinking former New York City shop teacher Ike Shapira, receives a fatal blow to the neck, the residents of Lake Rehoboth put on their sleuthing caps, notably board member Tamar Gillespie, but also obstreperous Orthodox Jew Harry Abramovitz and retired NYU philosophy professor Cubby Stone, producer of a redoubtable anti-Soviet play, which Fedya Kargman, an elderly Russian émigré, ambiguously compares to Brecht's The Measures Taken.