The Hasidic Rebbe’s Son (A Becks Ruchinsky Mystery)
Cozy Mystery
2nd in Series
Perricot Publishing (March 30, 2021)
Number of Pages – 318 pages

Synopsis

Boca Raton reporter Becks Ruchinsky is stunned when her son, Gabe, brings an ultra-Orthodox friend home from college and asks her to hide him. Six days later, his body is found floating in a canal. When police deem his death an accident, Becks launches her own inquiry—a journey that takes her from secretive Hasidic enclaves to the seedy underbelly of South Beach’s glitzy club scene—to find his killer. What she discovers jeopardizes her son’s life and challenges her religious conviction.

 

The Hasidic Rebbe’s Son is an intriguing and compulsively readable mystery that contrasts the beauty of Hasidic tradition with the unbending rules that may lead to desperation and murder.

Guest Post

This is my brain on music

Joan Lipinsky Cochran

Author, The Hasidic Rebbe’s Son

One of the biggest challenges I encounter as a writer is staying focused. That is, keeping my butt glued to the chair so I can write. Some days, I’d rather do anything – wash dishes, run the washing machine, sweep the kitchen – than tap at my keyboard. And I’m not alone. I’ve heard that writers who can’t walk their dogs to procrastinate tend to have very neat homes.

The one thing that does seem to work, though, is practicing the violin. I’m no Itzhak Pearlman or Joshua Bell or even on a par with the fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes, but it does seem to help me control the mental chatter that jams my brain.  It’s kind of like sleeping and dreaming, in that while you’re doing one thing—practicing—your subconscious is taking over and working out problems. I’ve learned, not surprisingly, that what I play on the violin matters in that its pace and tone influence what I’m writing.

For example, playing Irish music is like drinking lots of coffee. Pieces like Whiskey Before Breakfast and Swallowtail Jig are fast paced and involve a broad range of notes, which gets me hyped up for those high powered scenes when my protagonist is being pursued. Those songs always get my blood running and my heart beating. I played them as I was writing the two chase scenes in The Hasidic Rebbe’s Son as well as the end of the mystery when the stakes grow higher and higher.

Early on in the book, when I wrote about a character racing through the subway to escape his pursuer, I turned to a more technical and elaborate classical piece. Bachs Double Violin Concerto in D Minor. I’ve never played it well and find it to be physically demanding and frustrating work. It’s one of those pieces that makes me want to throw down the violin and stalk out of the room. I like to think the frustration I feel with that concerto is reflected a young Hasidic man’s mental state as he struggles to escape from a hoodlum and figure out his next step to freedom.

Fortunately, I can back away from the frustration I struggle with while trying to master classical composition by turning to one of my favorite  Irish tunes, called Shebeg and Shemore. Its origins are unclear but it is one of those pieces that every Irish musician insists on learning. It’s peaceful and uplifting, with a hint of longing, and is perfect when writing a slow or romantic interlude or when I want to slow down the pace of a novel. I played it at the point in The Hasidic Rebbe’ Son when my protagonist Becks and her husband Daniel are making an honest attempt to resolve their difficulties. Similarly, The Butterfly is a haunting Irish melody perfectly suited for writing scenes where Becks needs to sit down and think things out. The pace is slow and steady and perfect when a stymied Becks needs to employ her “little grey cells.”

I hope you enjoy the tunes . . . and my recent release, The Hasidic Rebbe’s Son. If you like it please post a review on your favorite social media.

About the Author

Joan Lipinsky Cochran is a South Florida-based writer whose crime and mystery novels focus on subcultures of American Judaism. In her latest novel, The Hasidic Rebbe’s Son, her protagonist is compelled to explore the glitzy South Beach nightclub scene and the secretive world of Hasidic Judaism to find a killer. It is the second in The Becks Ruchinsky Mystery Series. The first, The Yiddish Gangster’s Daughter, is the story of a woman whose world is upended – and life threatened – when she discovers her father was a member of the Jewish mafia.

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