The thirteenth hour

the long version

Deborah Stern, an American-born biologist working in a Jerusalem hospital, is nearly caught up in a terrorist attack that kills four women. Terrified, she signs up for a self-defense course, unaware that the Israeli General Security Service is watching it, hoping to find a civilian for a special mission. Raba Alhassan was raised in Detroit and has only recently returned to Jericho to live with her husband's aristocratic Palestinian family. She is stunned to learn that it is her brother who has killed the four women in Jerusalem. She little suspects that his actions were a ploy to lure her into the terrorist web. Nudged along by operatives willing to play on their loyalties, both women find themselves confronting imminent violence that threatens not only the fate of the stumbling peace accords but their own families. When the terrorists' plot unfolds in a diabolical manner beyond either Deborah's or Raba's imagining, the two women must resolve the conflicts between their national loyalties and their personal moralities to have any chance of saving dozens of innocent lives.