You just try detecting a murderer when you have a toddler and a newborn. . . . Former lawyer and now stay-at-home mother Juliet Applebaum gets dragged by the scruff of her neck into trying to find out what happened to her babysitter, a Hasidic teenage girl who just disappears without warning. To solve the mystery, she has to confront her past, her religion, and her chronic lack of sleep.


The murderer turned out to be very unexpected, but certainly not implausible, either in a physical or a psychological sense. The characters are handled mostly with sympathy, including the Hasidim, who are shown not as demons, but as people intensely different from anything else in Los Angeles, even in the view of a secular Jew in a mixed marriage.