Some years ago I listened spellbound as the writer Hillel Halkin told the story of a Jewish spy ring that aided the British against the Turks in Palestine during World War I. It was an incredible conspiracy, led by a beautiful woman, Sarah Aaronsohn. Her heroic span ended in betrayal, followed by her plea for vengeance. The story was so good that I invited Mr. Halkin to tell it in the form of a nonfiction, novel-like narrative that was, in the 1990s, serialized in the Forward under the title “The Liar.” Though it ran for a year or so, it was never completed, which is something I have regretted for years.

This has now been rectified by Mr. Halkin in a reworked and stunning new edition, “A Strange Death” (Public Affairs, 400 pages, $26). He tells the story as he learned it, starting with the day in 1970 that he and his wife, Marcia, arrived in the town of Zichron Ya’akov in northern Israel. They pulled off the road in search of a soft drink and ended up buying the plot of land on which they would build their house, make their home, and raise their daughters.

The town turned out to be the one where Sarah Aaronsohn had promulgated her plots; where, in 1917, she was captured and tortured by the Turks; and where she killed herself rather than risk being broken. It is where a Jewish woman in the village betrayed one of the spies. When the spy was arrested, he was mocked and assaulted by three other Jewish women, who sought to ingratiate themselves with the Turks. The four women eventually met what Sarah’s brother, Alexander Aaronsohn, in a book he wrote on the Nili, called a “comeuppance.” Adele Goldstein went mad. Gita Blumenfeld became an invalid. Tsippora Lerner lived out her life in disrepute. The betrayer, Perl Applebaum, died “a strange death.”

Was this the vengeance Sarah called for, and did it include murder? And how – and by whom? Mr. Halkin pieces out the answers to these questions. The result is part Sherwood Anderson, part Isaac Bashevis Singer, and part Graham Greene. It is hard to imagine that a more beautiful and evocative piece of writing about Palestine under the Ottoman Turks ever has been set down on paper.

A town’s worth of characters have their stories teased out by Mr. Halkin, who skitters over fences and into abandoned houses, visits a Palestinian refugee camp, pokes around dusty barns and basements for clues, and brings patience and sagacity to his quest for secrets that have been kept for decades. It seems that Mr. Halkin is unable to encounter anyone without pausing to illuminate some aspect of his or her story, or personality, or idiom.

Of Sarah Aaronsohn – whose portrait, incidentally, hangs in the editorial rooms of the Sun – we gain astonishing glimpses, though she is less a central character in Mr. Halkin’s tale than a presence looming in the background. The Aaronsohns were perceived as snooty and given to airs. Her brother Alexander was a pursuer of young girls. Sarah raised eyebrows in the town by permitting Yosef Lishansky, one of her co-conspirators, to spend nights in her bedroom.

Sarah herself comes off as a heroic and commanding figure, but also as demanding and derisive. During her torture by the Turks, she was allowed to return to her home to clean up. While there, she retrieved a pistol she’d secreted in the living room and shot herself. She missed a clean shot and, paralyzed, lingered for four days, vainly begging her doctor to kill her. She feared that, should delirium seize her, she’d talk. When, at one point she fainted, a village woman tried to revive her by dousing her with cologne. When some of it got in her eyes, Sarah snapped, “Can’t you do anything right.” When she died she was carried to her grave in mosquito netting.

The character at the center of Mr. Halkin’s story is Yanko Epstein, an erstwhile field guard who has gone on to become the director of the town’s historical museum. A less-than-reliable but always riveting raconteur, he comes off not so much as a liar but as a plagiarizer and an embroiderer of nigh Homeric proportions. He is Mr. Halkin’s guide around town and in his investigation of the Nili mystery. And he may, Mr. Halkin begins to suspect, know more than he’s prepared, even 50 years after the events, to confess.

When the Turks rolled up Nili, it was a brutal thing. They surrounded the town. As they tortured Sarah, her screams could be heard throughout much of the village. The father of one of the spies, Re’uven Schwarz, was marched through the town and whipped as he was forced to cry, “Re’uven, where are you?”

It was the arrest of another Aaronsohn confederate, Nisan Rutman, that brought into the street the three women. Mr. Halkin quotes Yanko Epstein as saying that Rutman, hands bound, was being led up the street by a Turkish soldier when Tsippora Lerner slapped his face, Adele Goldstein hit him with her shoe, and Gita Blumenfeld egged them on. When Mr. Epstein remarks that Perl Applebaum, who had tipped off the searchers as to where Rutman was hiding, wasn’t with them, Mr. Halkin replies he’d read that she died a “strange death.”

Mr. Epstein says nothing.

“What did she die of?” Mr. Halkin asks.

There was, Mr. Halkin writes, “a strange scraping sound in his throat as if something were stuck there. I turned to look at him again. His jaw was tight. A flush had spread through his cheeks.”

Then Mr. Epstein changed the subject.

Did he kill her? Does he know who killed her? Is the killer still alive? The cat-and-mouse game gripped Mr. Halkin for much of the 20 years over which he wrote this book, and he tells the story in such a fetching way that one almost tears the pages out in an effort to find the answer.

Were that all, the book would be successful. What makes it a triumph is that it is about much more than the fate of Perl Applebaum. It’s also about the tensions between the generations of the first and second migration of Jews to the land of Israel, about Jews and Arabs in Palestine, about truth telling versus storytelling, about memory versus invention. By its end the reader has gained an incomparable sense for the early years in the struggle for a Jewish state.