Jonathan Dunsky Books in Order

If you want the classic entry point: Ten Years Gone → The Dead Sister → The Auschwitz Violinist
If you want Adam's origin story first: The Auschwitz Detective → Ten Years Gone → A Debt of Death
If you want the newer historical mysteries: A Death In Jerusalem → In That Sleep of Death → The Jewish Policeman
If you want something outside Adam Lapid: The Payback Girl

Jonathan Dunsky was born in Tel Aviv in 1978 and grew up in a suburb of Jerusalem. He has said that much of his fiction returns to Israel because it is the place he knows best, with its heat, arguments, layered history, and streets where the past never feels very far away.

Books came early. So did English.

As a young teenager, Dunsky decided he wanted to know English thoroughly, and he went at it in a very direct way. He read books in English with a dictionary beside him, looking up every unfamiliar word as he went. He has said that the habit stayed with him, and that early stretch of determined reading helped shape him as both a reader and a writer. He started with children's books, then moved into horror, fantasy, and science fiction, reading writers like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, and Robert Silverberg.

He tried writing young, too. Dunsky wrote his first novel at eighteen and later said, with some honesty, that it was terrible. Then fiction went quiet for a long time. He kept reading, kept living, and eventually returned to writing after an eighteen-year break. That return led to his first published novels, The Dead Sister and The Auschwitz Violinist, both written in 2015.

From there, his main body of work quickly became clear. The Adam Lapid books, including Ten Years Gone, A Debt of Death, The Auschwitz Detective, A Death In Jerusalem, and In That Sleep of Death, follow a Holocaust survivor and former police detective working as a private investigator in the early years of Israel. Readers who like the series usually respond to the same mix of qualities: strong mysteries, plainspoken emotion, and a real sense that the history matters. Adam is not a polished hero. He is tired, scarred, stubborn, and deeply serious about justice. That gives the books their pull.

History is the engine.

Dunsky has said he loves history and solving puzzles, and his fiction sits right where those interests meet. His novels often explore survival, grief, guilt, vengeance, and the hard business of building a life after catastrophe. The settings do a lot of work too. Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, postwar Europe, and displaced persons camps are not decorative backdrops in these books. They shape the crimes, the motives, and the moral choices.

He does not only write historical mysteries. His standalone thriller The Payback Girl moves into contemporary crime, and his shorter fiction ranges further into fantasy, humor, and the supernatural. Even when the genre changes, there is a familiar thread in his work: pressure, consequence, and ordinary people pushed into difficult corners.

Dunsky has also lived outside Israel, including several years in Amsterdam, before returning home. He now lives in Israel with his wife and two sons. As a public speaker, he is often asked to talk about Israeli and Jewish history, the art of writing, and the way mystery fiction and history can work together.

One thing that stands out across his books is how readable they are. He likes clean setups, sharp forward motion, and characters who have been hurt but are still moving. If you come to Jonathan Dunsky for the mystery, the history, or both at once, that is exactly where his work tends to land.