Invisible City, Dahl - B +

                                              This is the first book in an intended series about Rebekah Roberts, a cub reporter for the mythic NY Tribune, a flat-out distasteful tabloid. Her back story is bit odd.  Her mother is a Hasidic Jew who had a fling with Rebekah's religious, albeit Christian, dad, gave birth and left to return to her people. Rebekah is a recent grad of the University of Central Florida journalism school, a stringer for the paper, and a young resident of the up and coming Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. She is very conflicted, but primarily angry, about her mother.  She is assigned to a story about the murder of a young Hasidic woman and the novel turns into a searing indictment of the Hasidic community.  If half of the story is true, I'm embarrassed for the City for giving them so much leeway and appalled that such a community can prosper in this country. They are allowed a tremendous amount of autonomy because of their political clout. That autonomy extends to their murder victims not requiring autopsies. Their children do not stay in school through the minimal age required by law. Their medieval family practices and structures are apparently accepted in Family Court. Divorcing parents who leave the community aren't allowed visitation because it would interfere with the child's religious training. They utilize a self-policing vigilante system. Most appalling is that they treat their woman no better than the Wahhabi's in Saudi Arabia. Their rationale is that they must remain a strong, self-reliant community after what happened in Europe seventy years ago. The plot is pretty good, although I thought it slipped in the end. I'm looking forward to the next few.