36 Righteous Men by Steven Pressfield

W. W. Norton & Co., 360 pages, $26.95

Ah, a murderer who seems to appear out of nowhere to strangle and brand his victims, a list of people killed in the same bizarre way in many different countries, and increasingly hazardous climate catastrophes. Are we talking End Times or The Apocalypse? Maybe.

Author Seven Pressfield has developed a hair-raising, propulsive, intriguing thriller that includes all of the above.

Do you know the story of the 36 righteous men from the Talmud? The world is saved from God’s destruction by the existence of 36 righteous men living among us at all times. Should the 36 cease to exist, so will the world. What if someone (or -thing) is murdering those 36 people. (Ahem, as it turns out, not all of the righteous 36 are male in this story.)

The year is 2034 and cataclysmic ecological disasters are already making portions of the world uninhabitable. For instance, Manhattan is frequently awash in seawater as the oceans’ level rises. There are nasty storms that are becoming increasingly more violent. Millions of people have died and millions more are fleeing to higher ground.

But it is not quite a free-for-all in Manhattan. Yet. But through the deaths of two prominent men, one in Manhattan and one in D.C., Detective Jim Manning and his unlikely assistant Detective (Third Grade) Covina “Dewey” Duwai begin to see a conspiracy surfacing. The connection between the victims is a commitment to mitigating the probable environmental collapse. Why would someone want to kill people who are trying to help?

Dewey is the narrator. She is a hard-working, ladder-climbing, loyal, clever, and talented detective. (“Third Grade means I’m a grunt.”) She is thrilled to be working with Manning, even if he is a precinct pariah, because he is the best investigator NYPD’s Division Six has. I’ll let her present herself:

I am twenty-eight years old, the youngest female in DivSix by nine years. My degree is a bachelor of science in criminal justice from St. John’s, plus three years as a patrol officer. I served in the Marine Corps for three years before that. I speak fluent Spanish and can get along in Portuguese and Tagalog.

And she is a whiz at computer-related stuff. She is also thorough and has surreptitiously scoped out her partner/mentor. She reveals both his brilliance and his despair. Dewey herself is somewhat less transparent. She exists almost as a disembodied voice, a voice-over Watson for the independent sleuth.

Here she is about Manning:

There are old-school detectives, and then there is Manning. He’s a troglodyte, a Neanderthal. I know next to nothing about his personal history, other than the fact that he came out of a twelve-month leave of absence following a family tragedy two weeks before I was assigned to work with him.

The mystery of the deaths deepens when their medical examiner discovers there is a subcutaneous “brand” between the victims’ eyes: “LV.” So in addition to trying to figure out whodunnit, there is also the question of whattheheck. How was it possible to brand the victims without external damage?

Then a mysterious woman appears. She communicates with Dewey and tells her that “LV” stands for lamed vav, Hebrew representing 36. Another helpful person explains the tale of the righteous 36 to Manning. Yeah, but that’s nuts, right? But then so is the “impossible” way in which their victims were killed.

As Manning and Dewey proceed to investigate the Judaic story of the 36, they discover there potentially are more victims. Eventually, they meet and join with people who say they trying to protect the remaining 36. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

Pressfield has envisioned an embattled world, and he has Dewey relate a lot of the destruction going on. There might be a monstrous being roaming around killing people, but that’s nothing compared to how the world lives (or survives) in that (slightly) future time. For instance, here’s a description of an area of New York City the detectives visit for clues:

You exit Little Hong Kong on foot along a series of suspended walkways, like rain forest bridges, swaying dubiously about eight inches above the petro-scum surface of Jamaica Bay. These catwalks have no handrails. They’re about as wide as a lawn mower. This constriction, however, does nothing to retard the bumper-to-Uber, two-way traffic of pushcarts, mopeds, deliverymen and -women using Chinese coolie carrying poles, tea and coffee hawkers with their dispenser tanks on their backs, not to mention hookers, skimmers, incense peddlers, acrobats, jugglers, three-card monte dealers, political orators, one-legged guys selling wild Siberian chaga, bhang, khosh, naswar, and half a hundred types of aphrodisiacs, psychedelics, soporifics, and herbal intoxicants that I’ve never heard of and neither have you. Canvas sheets overhead shield the floating city from the sun.

This is an extraordinary book in many ways. Pressfield keeps the action moving. He makes the possibility of a religious apocalypse seem credible. He has created intriguing — if somewhat lacking in facets — main characters. He scares the hell out of me with his descriptions of what awaits us ecologically. I would give this an MBTB star, but I confess I did not like the ending. I’m frustrated I can’t say what I didn’t like about it, but I will say that if the last chapter did not exist, I would be happier. Oh, well. Otherwise, I enjoyed the heck out of this book.