Dimensions
159 x 240 x 32mm
On a cold morning in February 1942, with the world plunged in the horrors of World War Two, Avraham Stern was in hiding in an attic in Tel Aviv, a price on his head. He’d been on the run for weeks, his picture blazoned across the newspapers and on billboards all over Palestine. As leader of the eponymous Stern Gang, he had committed a string of spectacular and murderous crimes sparking public outcry from both British and Jewish groups.
An intellectual poet and mystic, Stern believed himself destined for greatness; a Jewish Garibaldi whose fate was to liberate Palestine from British rule. He had rejected every comfortable option put before him in his life, drawn always to the margins - his writings drenched in images of martyrdom and blood. Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton, a middle-class Londoner who had swopped milk deliveries for the excitement and dangers of colonial policing, was the man tasked with stopping Stern. Seemingly so different to his adversary, in fact the men shared much in common - ambition, dedication to duty and conviction in his own righteousness.
The events of that morning in Mizrachi B Street would be endlessly contested but two things were clear; Morton had cornered Stern in his attic hide-out and, minutes later, had shot him dead. What appeared to be an end was in fact a beginning. Stern would prove a far more powerful enemy in death than he had ever been in life. The shots Morton fired that day would echo down the remaining years of British rule in Palestine and reverberate through the titanic events that shaped the birth of Israel.
Based on revelatory archive research, the private archive of Morton and interviews with first-hand witnesses, The Reckoning is a true detective story - the first book to tell the tale of a rebel who terrorized then became a founding father of Israel, the lawman determined to stop him and the creation of a cult of martyrdom that destroyed any hope of compromise between Arab and Jew.
