A 1672 memo­r­i­al in the Venice Ghet­to hon­ors a man ​“slaugh­tered like a lamb.” This nov­el is a fic­tion­al account of why Yehu­dit Baldosa’s beloved broth­er Mordechai was mur­dered and who killed him. It is a sto­ry of peo­ple con­fined and pro­tect­ed by lit­er­al and metaphor­ic walls with­in walls, of one man’s quest for indi­vid­ual free­dom, one woman’s relent­less pur­suit of jus­tice, and the Jew­ish community’s striv­ing for uni­ty and nation­al sal­va­tion. The nar­ra­tive inter­weaves Mordechai’s life in the weeks before his death with Yehudit’s sub­se­quent inves­ti­ga­tion. To dis­cov­er what hap­pened, Yehu­dit — a strong-willed wid­owed moth­er, duti­ful, and edu­cat­ed — must defy pater­nal­is­tic con­straints on her life as a woman. Her search for the killer expos­es pos­si­ble motives for mur­der, includ­ing jeal­ousy inflamed by for­bid­den love, revenge by diehard sup­port­ers of the false mashiach Shab­be­tai Tsvi, and the threat posed to the Venet­ian aris­toc­ra­cy by Mordechai’s advo­ca­cy of rad­i­cal Enlight­en­ment ideals. Yehudit’s deter­mi­na­tion to find and speak the truth forces her to choose between safe­ty with­in the Bal­dosa fam­i­ly and loy­al­ty to the broth­er she loved.