Ellen Frankel

Ellen Frankel (born 1951 in New York City) - a scholar, author, and storyteller who currently resides in Sarasota, Florida, and Maine. She served for 18 years as the Editor-in-Chief and CEO of the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) before retiring in 2009. Author of over ten books, including The Five Books of Miriam and The JPS Illustrated Children’s Bible. An accomplished librettist, she has written lyrics for several operas and chamber pieces. She is included in this bibliography because her main protagonist is Israeli and so are the settings of all her books. Her Jerusalem Mysteries series (3 so far) feature Maya Rimon as the protagonist. Rimon is a high-level Israeli intelligence agent working for “The Service” (a fictionalized version of Israel’s elite domestic security agency, similar to the Shin Bet). She is portrayed as a daring, “maverick” intelligence officer tasked with handling cases that threaten national security, often involving religious or political extremism. Beyond her career, she is characterized as a single mother struggling to balance her high-stakes profession with a contentious custody battle over her young daughter. 

The Deadly Scrolls (2022) begins with the murder of an American professor which reveals his discovery of a lost Dead Sea Scroll, a genuine historical artifact also known as the Copper Scroll. The text on this scroll reportedly encodes the secret hiding places of the lost Second Temple treasures. Maya Rimon races against time to locate the scroll’s secrets and stop a religious extremist from using the information to launch a terrorist attack on the Temple Mount, which would trigger an apocalypse in Jerusalem. The book explores themes of religious fanaticism and the challenges Maya faces as a single mother in the male-dominated world of Israeli intelligence. 

In The Hyena Murders (2022), a serial killer targets the family of a prominent Ethiopian member of the Israeli Knesset. The murderer leaves cryptic clues at the crime scenes, including slash wounds made by a ceremonial knife and images of hyenas, linking the killings to Ethiopian folklore and the experiences of the Jewish community in Ethiopia. As Maya investigates the case with her rival, Police Chief Inspector Sarit Levine, she uncovers a buried diary that holds the key to solving the murders and confronting the underlying issues of discrimination and racism faced by Ethiopian Jews in Israel. 

The Passover Protocols (2024): Just before Passover, a boy’s blood-drained body is found at a Jerusalem synagogue, sparking fears of a “blood libel”. Maya Rimon and Inspector Sarit Levine must stop an American neo-Nazi group, the Aryan Vanguard, from attacking Yad Vashem.  [Google/AI]

Frankel, Ellen, (The Deadly Scrolls [Maya Rimon/The Jerusalem Mysteries Book 1, Wicked Son, 2022] [hc] 978-1637583586 [pb, 2023] 978-1637589342

Frankel, Ellen, (The Hyena Murders [Maya Rimon/The Jerusalem Mysteries Book 2, Wicked Son, pb, 2023] 978-1637589359

Frankel, Ellen, (The Passover Protocols [Maya Rimon/The Jerusalem Mysteries Book 3, Wicked Son, pb, 2023] 979-8888454480