There is an ancient Jew­ish leg­end that 36 right­eous peo­ple in every gen­er­a­tion, unknown to the world, to each oth­er and even to them­selves, enable the world to con­tin­ue to exist through their good deeds. The nov­el 36 is a meta­phys­i­cal mys­tery set in the near future, the premise of which is that the leg­end is lit­er­al­ly true and the right­eous are being mur­dered one by one, with cat­a­stroph­ic results for the Jew­ish peo­ple — Israel hav­ing been destroyed with nuclear weapons by jihadists — and the world as a whole, which is suf­fer­ing unend­ing crises from wars and destruc­tion of the envi­ron­ment. Into this near-apoc­a­lyp­tic set­ting steps Eric Lon­nrot, a non-Jew­ish police detec­tive from the Mid­west who car­ries a ter­ri­ble bur­den of guilt for hav­ing col­lab­o­rat­ed with a dic­ta­tor­ship that briefly ruled Amer­i­ca, and is deter­mined to redeem him­self by find­ing and res­cu­ing the Right­eous. Accom­pa­ny­ing him is Nahum Apple­feld, a refugee from the destruc­tion of Israel who car­ries a ter­ri­ble secret of his own: his yearn­ing for a girl he fell in love with in Israel and nev­er saw again. Lonnrot’s quest for the Right­eous, and Nahum’s quest for the girl he once loved, are the engine of the nov­el.