From Sun to Sun

From Sun to Sun is highly unconventional crime novel that presents two parallel stories separated by twenty-five centuries.

The first set in modern New York City, featuring a hardworking smart-mouthed Latina investigator, Felicity Ortega Pérez, specializing in forensic accounting and document examination, as she hunts for a missing person who holds the clue to an ancient mystery. Little does she realize how deep the criminality goes and what she will learn about her own hidden past.

The ancient section is a radical revision of the Book of Ruth—the first person in the Bible to convert to the religion of Israel. When Ruth’s husband dies under strange circumstances, she must join the exiles returning to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple in order to secure a future for herself, her grieving mother-in-law Naomi, and her future offspring. Unfortunately, the returning exiles also include religious leaders like Ezra and Nehemiah, who plan to “purify” the land by expelling all the foreign women, and Ruth must prove her worth under dire conditions, including a major famine.

From Sun to Sun is a tale of love, devotion, and sacrifice depicting the challenges facing two determined “foreign” women as they battle ignorance, hatred, and indifference in two distinct historical periods—Iron Age Israel and the modern world. Each in their own struggle to find justice and a place in society—a seemingly endless battle in a time of social upheaval, fluid identities, and diverse cross-cultural complexities.

In short, the novel is about combating prejudice, and who gets to decide who is “one of us” and who is a “foreigner,” and what it takes to prove you belong.

Praise for Kenneth Wishnia's previous works

“Packed with enough mayhem and atmosphere for two novels.” 
—Booklist

“Wishnia cuts a different path with his stories and novels, choosing subjects, settings, and characters of a sort the reader is unlikely to encounter in the mainstream of mystery and crime fiction. His fine sensibility and skillful prose will appeal to discriminating readers.”
—Janet Hutchings, editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

“Sharp and sexy. . . . Hilarious and exciting. . . . [Wishnia] has a perfect ear for female urban angst.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Riveting circumstances, a strongly focused plot, and ably described settings make this essential reading.”
—Library Journal

“Wishnia’s brand of gritty surrealism jolts the reader with startling images and jarring contrasts. [He] evokes a country and a culture vividly and unforgettably.“
—Publishers Weekly

“Enormously engaging. It’s as if Wishnia were attempting to rescue the thriller from the bloat and preposterousness of Ludlumization in order to return it to its more Graham Greene-like roots in a recognizably mean real world—just as Chandler and Hammett rescued detective fiction from drawing-room gentility and yanked it down to the mean streets that had always been its natural habitat.“
—Washington Post

Kenneth Wishnia’s novels include 23 Shades of Black, which was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel and an Anthony for Best Paperback Original; Soft Money, a Library Journal Best Mystery of the Year; and Red House, a Washington Post Book World “Rave” Book of the Year. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Queens Noir, Long Island Noir, Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail, and elsewhere. He edited the Anthony Award–nominated anthology Jewish Noir and coedited Jewish Noir II with Chantelle Aimée Osman. He teaches writing, literature, and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College on Long Island.

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