If you can imagine a plot that hits the ground running with the Mossad and Shabak security agencies, then swings into a world of espionage with Fauda-style combat, you will be imagining the award-winning thriller Operation Bethlehem by former intelligence officer, author Yariv Inbar. 

 

Daniel, a French national, shuns his father’s timidity but idolizes his adventurous grandfather, a former archeologist who, at one time, conducted digs into the Temple Mount’s subterranean tunnels. Now, of age, Daniel immigrates to Israel, undergoes training which qualifies him as an agent in the Mossad. As a key operative in an important Mossad raid in a foreign country, Daniel joins with partner and fiancée Yael on a dangerous mission. It fails because of him. The experience, killing two civilians, devastates Daniel. Discharged from the organization, Daniel takes time for personal recovery outside of Israel.

 

While recuperating from the trauma of his aborted mission, Daniel turns his thoughts to his grandfather’s conviction that lost treasures of the Second Temple are buried under a Mosque somewhere near Jerusalem. Daniel determines to return to Israel to prove his grandfather right.  He does so, with a brand-new identity, under the guise of an Arab-speaking, French Muslim. He applies and receives a position as an aide in a psychiatric hospital, in Bethlehem---rumored to sit on the site of an ancient, demolished Mosque.

 

Daniel employs his expertise in covert operations to scout out his grandfather’s convincing stories. Supplemented with a clue from “old Ibrahim,” a partially demented patient who rambles on about entering a “hole” in the hospital grounds, Daniel connoiters into the hospital’s greenhouse on a path that leads to a concealed basement. Could his grandfather be right? Could he find an ancient treasure buried underground? Daniel plans to rehabilitate his find for the sake of his beloved grandfather and return triumphant to Israel.  

 

But as Daniel begins his secret incursion into the underground lair, he is dumbfounded to be confronted by a group of Shabakniks led by his former fiancée and agent Yael, whom he not seen for over five years. Immediately apprehended, Daniel undergoes unrelenting grilling for his supposed reversed allegiance. Satisfied Daniel has never departed from his loyalty to Israel, the agents believe Daniel’s quest to find Temple Treasures.

 

Daniel however is inconsequential to the Mossad’s intended mission in the sleepy town of Bethlehem … to avert an imminent raid on Israel by a terrorist group called Hamas. Can they trust Daniel to help them? And would Yael reveal a life-altering secret that would irrevocably change Daniel’s life?

 

An action - packed stimulant Operation Bethlehem, tailor-made for readers who love mystery, suspense and intrigue ---Israeli style.