Press

Take a female newspaper reporter in Manhattan named Rebekah Roberts covering a murder in the Hasidic community — where a recent murder has everyone talking — and you’ve got a very good and probing debut novel by CBSNews.com reporter Julia Dahl.

Julia Dahl is the author of the new novel Invisible City, which is about a young reporter who covers a murder in Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jewish community. Dahl has worked for CBS News.com and the New York Post, and she lives in Brooklyn.

T is for thrillers: Summer is prime time for crime fiction lovers, with plenty of works by old favorites (Ace Atkins, Alafair Burke, Michael Koryta, Jenny Milchman, Karin Slaughter, John Verdon among them) and promising debuts from Julia Dahl ( Invisible City) and Neely Tucker ( The Ways of the Dead).

Julia Dahl’s first novel, “Invisible City,” is about a tabloid reporter in New York City covering the murder of a Hasidic woman. The novel, which came out in May, is fiction, but Dahl, a reporter for CBSNews.com, had some similar experiences of her own to tap. She spoke with Poynter about the book, writing for

I talk with Rhod Sharp and Tara Godomski about INVISIBLE CITY and reporting on crime in NYC

Wherein I talk to Andrew DeCanniere about growing up in Fresno, reporting on sexual assault, and my love for Bruce Springsteen.

INVISIBLE CITY: This smart and punchy murder-mystery is set in the cloistered world of NYC’s ultra-Orthodox community — and the best part? It was written by a former Post reporter.

Drawing upon her own experience tracking the 2011 case of a kidnapped Hasidic child, Dahl spins an impossible-to-put-down mystery about big-city corruption and the sacrifices made in the name of religion–all with a twist we never saw coming.

Debut author Julia Dahl discusses her mystery novel, Invisible City.

The first thing we learn about New York tabloid journalism from INVISIBLE CITY is that a body in Gowanus takes precedence over a brothel in Chinatown. Rebekah Roberts, the narrator of Julia Dahl’s first novel, is fresh out of college and considers herself lucky to be working as a stringer for a bottom-feeding tabloid.