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In 1986, when Laura Blumenfeld was a junior at Harvard College, her father was shot in Jerusalem by a member of a rebel faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization responsible for attacks on several tourists in the Old City. Her father lived, but Laura's desire for revenge haunted her, and a decade later she finds herself going undercover in Israel, looking for the terrorist who shot her father.

Traveling to Europe, America, and the Middle East, she soaks up the stories and methods of avengers the world over as she plots to infiltrate the shooter's life. Through interviews with Yitzhak Rabin's assassin, with members of the Albanian Blood Feud Committee, the chief of the Iranian judiciary, the mayor of Palermo, Sicily, an Egyptian heroin smuggler, then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, priests and prostitutes, sports fans and fifth-grade girls, she explores the mechanics and the psychology of vengeance.

Ultimately, her journey leads her back home -- where she is forced to confront a long-simmering drama in her family. In the end, her target turns out to be more complex -- and in some ways more threatening -- than the stereotypical terrorist she'd long imagined.

Revenge: A Story Of Hope is a rare, ambitious, personal and intellectual tour of dark urges often denied; about family, loyalty and home; about the personal passions behind public events and about the thin line between love and hate.