No Saving Grace

"When I had things to believe in," he thinks, "they usually broke my heart."

Matt Jacob has seen his share of life's darker side as a social worker -- and more than his share of its underside as a private eye in the less-than-blueblood districts of Boston. He watches too much late-night TV, smokes too many cigarettes, and thinks too much for his own good. Sometimes high, often down, but never out, Matt Jacob is a survivor.

Maybe that's what draws him to his latest assignment -- penetrating the fiercely private world of an embattled Hasidic Jewish sect. In the midst of a holy celebration, a powerful and beloved rabbi is gunned down by the ringleader of a white supremacist hate group -- who in turn is shot dead by another rabbi. To help attorney and friend Simon Roth defend the volatile Rabbi Yonah Saperstein, Matt agrees to ferret out the first-hand facts in the double slaying.

Amid the Hasidim, Matt finds a people with a rage to survive. Among the White Avengers, he finds only rage. Though the battle lines are clearly drawn, Matt's moral compass detects a blurring of the lines between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and vigilantism,