Laurie Brandt

Recently, I completed And Justice There Is None and I was left with a very unsettled feeling. I was reacting to Deborah Crombie's choice of making her villain, Karl Arrowood, Jewish. She chose to not only make him Jewish, but the son of German Jewish immigrants – Holocaust survivors - who denies his Jewish identity. These attributes are pregnant with negative stereotypes and struck me as purely anti-semitic. I wrote to the author asking her to explain what she had in mind in making your dastardly villain Jewish. She never replied. I find it very odd that none of the reviewers took any notice of her choice of ethnicity for her villain. It made no sense in the context of the plot - making it feel all the more anti-semitic.