Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery (Omar Yussef Mysteries) [Hardcover]

Matt Beynon Rees (Author)

Book Description

Series: Omar Yussef Mysteries | Publication Date: February 1, 2010

Praise for the Omar Yussef series:

“Astonishing.”—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

“Matt Beynon Rees has taken a complex world of culture clash and suspicion and placed upon it humanity.”—David Baldacci

“Omar’s probe of a West Bank ruled by political intrigue, religious hatred, and militia thugs lets ex-TIME Jerusalem bureau chief Rees make the Mideast conflict personal.”—Entertainment Weekly

“A beautifully written story. . . . [Omar Yussef’s] decency is a light in the gloom. I shall not forget him.”—Anne Perry

“Rees tells this grim story with skill, specificity and richly detailed descriptions of people and places. . . . Offers a vivid portrait of Palestinian life today.”—The Washington Post

“The best—and the rarest—sort of mystery: exciting and compelling, but it is also a deeply moving story.”—David Liss

“Omar Yussef is a splendid creation.”—Colin Dexter

Arriving to visit his son in a heavily Palestinian area of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Omar Yussef discovers the beheaded body of one of the boy’s roommates. When his son is arrested as a suspect, Omar Yussef must prove his innocence.

Matt Beynon Rees was born in South Wales. He was previously the Jerusalem bureau chief for TIME magazine and has covered the Middle East as a journalist for over a decade. He is the author of Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East, as well as four books in the Omar Yussef series. He won the Crime Writers’ Association New Blood Dagger for the first mystery in the series.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The relentless cycle of violence and retribution follows Palestinian detective Omar Yussef to New York City, where he must deliver a speech at the U.N. on schooling in the Palestinian refugee camps, in Rees's excellent fourth mystery (after 2009's The Samaritan's Secret). When Yussef's son, Ala, is arrested after a decapitated body is found in Ala's Brooklyn apartment, Yussef's search for the real killer leads him from Atlantic Avenue to Coney Island and back to the U.N. Secretariat. In the process, he discovers that he's not quite the cosmopolitan man he thought himself to be, a realization shared by many Arab immigrants in the story. In truth, the residents of Little Palestine are caught between its subterranean mosques and the lure of Manhattan, where forbidden pleasures are ready for the plucking. Yussef remains reliably human and compassionate toward human fallibility, while raging openly at the corruption of his own leaders. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Road trips in crime series have the built-in problem of removing their heroes from the landscapes that define them. Rees’ Bethlehem history teacher and occasional sleuth Omar Yussef is a strong enough character to survive a temporary transplant to New York, but that’s not to say we don’t miss the vividly evoked Palestine setting. Yussef has agreed to attend a UN conference in Manhattan because it will give him a chance to see his son, Ala, who is living in Brooklyn’s Little Palestine neighborhood. The reunion is spoiled, however, when Yussef finds one of Ala’s roommates dead, the victim of what appears to be a ritual killing. With Ala a suspect, Yussef attempts to find the killer. Could the history lessons that Yussef once taught Ala and his friends have been corrupted into a contemporary suicide-assassination plot? Although the setting and the high-concept premise—the finale evokes The Manchurian Candidate—take us too far away from the small human dramas that usually drive this series, Yussef himself never loses sight of what he calls “the life that remains when politics is sluiced away like the filth a stray dog leaves in the street.” --Bill Ott

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Soho Crime; 1 edition (February 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1569476195
• ISBN-13: 978-1569476192
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.1 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,045,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm an award-winning British crime novelist. Major authors have compared my writing with the work of Graham Greene, John Le Carre, Georges Simenon and Henning Mankell. The French magazine L'Express called me "the Dashiell Hammett of Palestine."

WHERE: I live in Jerusalem. I came here in 1996. For love. Then we divorced. But the place took hold. Not for the violence and the excitement that sometimes surrounds it, but because I saw people in extreme situations. Through the emotions they experienced, I came to understand myself.

BEFORE THE WRITING: There was never really a time before I wrote. I've been at it since I was seven (a poem about a tree, on the classroom wall with a gold star beside it.) But I arrived in the Middle East as a journalist with only a couple of published short stories to my name. First I wrote for The Scotsman, then Newsweek, and from 2000 until 2006 as Time Magazine's Jerusalem bureau chief. I won some awards for covering the intifada. Yasser Arafat once tried to have me arrested, but I eluded him and decided to focus on fiction. I'd learned so much about the Palestinians - and about life - that didn't fit into the limited world of journalism. So I wrote my Palestinian crime novels.

BEFORE JERUSALEM: I was born in Newport, Wales, in 1967. That's my mother's hometown; my father's from Maesteg in the Llynfi valley. We moved around, to Cardiff and Croydon, then I studied English at Wadham College, Oxford University with Terry Eagleton as my tutor. Contemporaries may remember me as the fellow with bleached blonde hair at the bar of the King's Arms in the company of the Irish porters from All Souls College. I did an MA at the University of Maryland and lived in New York for five years before I hit the Middle East.

WHERE THE BOOKS CAME FROM: I wrote a nonfiction account of Israeli and Palestinian society called Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East in 2004 (Free Press). I'm proud of it, because it really gets to the heart of the conflict here - it isn't one of those notebook-dump foreign correspondent books.

I was looking for my next project and came up with the idea for Omar Yussef, my Palestinian sleuth, while chatting with my wife in our favorite hotel, the Ponte Sisto in the Campo de'Fiori in Rome. I realized I had become friends with many colorful Palestinians who'd given me insights into the dark side of their society. Like the former Mister Palestine (he dead-lifts 900 pounds), a one-time bodyguard to Yasser Arafat (skilled in torture), and a delightful fellow who was a hitman for Arafat during the 1980s. To tell the true-life stories I'd amassed over a decade, I decided to channel the reporting into a crime series. After all, Palestine's reality is no romance novel.

THE NOVELS: The first novel, The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title The Bethlehem Murders), was published in February 2007 by Soho Press. In the UK it won the prestigious Crime Writers Association John Creasey Dagger in 2008, and was nominated in the US for the Barry First Novel Award, the Macavity First Mystery Award, and the Quill Best Mystery Award. In France it's been shortlisted for the Prix des Lecteurs. New York Times reviewer Marilyn Stasio called it "an astonishing first novel." It was named one of the Top 10 Mysteries of the Year by Booklist and, in the UK Sir David Hare made it his Book of the Year in The Guardian.

Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse novels, called Omar Yussef "a splendid creation." Omar was called "Philip Marlowe fed on hummus" by one reviewer and "Yasser Arafat meets Miss Marple" by another.

The second book in the series, A Grave in Gaza, appeared in February 2008 (and at the same time under the title The Saladin Murders in the UK). The Bookseller calls it "a cracking, atmospheric read." I put in elements of the plot relating to British military cemeteries in Gaza in homage to my two great uncles, who rode through there with the Imperial Camel Corps in 1917. One of them, Uncle Dai Beynon, was still around when I was a boy, and I was named after him.

The third book in the series, The Samaritan's Secret, was published in February 2009. The New York Times said it was "provocative" and it had great reviews in places I'd not have expected - The Sowetan, the newspaper of that S. African township, for example.

AROUND THE WORLD: My Omar Yussef Mystery series has been sold to leading publishers in 23 countries: the U.S., France, Italy, Britain, Poland, Spain, Germany, Holland, Israel, Portugal, Brazil, Norway, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Romania, Sweden, Iceland, Chile, Venezuela, Japan, Indonesia, Turkey and Greece.

OMAR'S NEXT TRAVELS: THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, the fourth novel in my series, will be published in February 2010. In it, Omar visits the famous Palestinian town of Brooklyn, New York (there really is a growing community there in Bay Ridge), and finds a dead body in his son's bed...

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Omar Yussef in New York, January 11, 2010

By 

Blue in Washington "Barry Ballow" (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery (Omar Yussef Mysteries) (Hardcover)

Author Matt Beynon Rees brings his Palestinian educator/sleuth, Omar Yussef aka Abu Ramiz, to New York City for an appearance at a UN conference on Palestine in this latest addition to the terrific mystery series. The shift in venues could have been tricky for a story that is so strongly identified with The West Bank, Gaza and Israel, but author Rees has successfully transposed the context of that Middle East struggle to two NYC neighborhoods--the UN in Manhattan and the Little Palestine district of Brooklyn.

Omar Yussef gets off a mid-winter transatlantic flight and goes straight to visit his youngest son, Ala, in Brooklyn. Arriving at his son's apartment, he finds a headless body which appears to be that of his beloved son. This first horrific discovery leads to a larger collection of miseries that have followed a number transplanted Palestinians--some of them former students of Omar Yussef's--to their hoped for sanctuary in the U.S. Joined by his old warrior friend, Khamis Zeydan, Yussef finds the first murder will eventually lead to the planned assassination of the President of the Palestinian Authority who is also at the UN for the conference.

Writer Rees has a special gift for evoking the environment--in this case the miserable cold of a northern U.S. winter and the general seediness of the immigrant neighborhoods of Brooklyn. His talent for fleshing out highly believable characters is no less impressive. Certainly he has nailed the alienation and frustration felt by new immigrants to the U.S. and the desire to return home, no matter how hopeless the situation there.

"The Fourth Assassin" delivers an excellent mystery story while maintaining the integrity of the characters--the redoubtable and cranky Omar Yussef, in particular--that readers of earlier books in this series have come to know and cherish. Thoroughly enjoyable read. A four plus on the Amazon scale.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Omar Yussef Does It Again!, February 2, 2010

By 

L. King "Eclectic Reader" (Toronto Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery (Omar Yussef Mysteries) (Hardcover)

A wonderful mystery full of political and cultural touchstones. This time out our protagonist is in New York for a UN conference and to visit his son Ala who is living in New York with 2 more of Omar Yussif's former students. However all is not well (is it ever in a murder mystery? ;-) ) and one of his roomates winds up dead.

As the story unfolds we find that when they were 12 Ala and 3 of his friends (the 4 Assassins) had pretended to be disciples of the medieval "Old Man of the Mountain", leader of the Hashishins (Assassins). Abu Ramiz (Omar Yussef), ever the history teacher, encouraged the boys in their fantasy and took on the role of their leader. The motif of the Assassins guild works its way into the plot and it seems that now that the boys are grown up the game may have grown real. Is Abu Ramiz responsible for what the boys have become?

The plot twists in unexpected ways and just when you think the mysteries have been resolved they twist again, but everything is believable, everything is consistent. The characterizations are excellent from a token collector in the subway to Hamza Abayat the ex patriot Palestinian and now NYC police detective, the beautiful Rania and the portrayals of locations, even distant ones like Bethlehem, the Bekka Valley in Lebanon or ones near the action are deftly and evocatively drawn against a backdrop of competing Palestinian factions. Old favorites re-emerge such as Magnus Wallender (too briefly) and Khamis Zeydan, who Abu Ramiz's best friend, Bethlehem's well connected Chief of Police and acting security advisor to the President (never named! - a good literary move as it will not make the story dated later on) on his visit to America and the UN.

I greatly enjoyed the book and I'm definitely hooked for the next installment. A double blessing on author Matt Beynon Rees. May Allah provide him with even more tales to tell of his intrepid school teacher detective.

Highly recommended!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strongly Recommended, June 8, 2010

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery (Omar Yussef Mysteries) (Hardcover)

Matt Beynon Rees, a Welsh journalist living in Jerusalem, writes a series known as the Omar Yussef Mysteries. If you pick up anything at all that is bound between two covers, you should be buying and reading them even if you hate mysteries. If you happen to like mysteries, please read THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, the latest Yussef novel, and recommend it to an unenlightened friend.

Yussef is that iconic reasonable man who is in a very bad place at a very bad time. Officially, he is a husband, father of three adult sons, and history teacher at a school run by the United Nations in the Palestinian territories. A non-practicing Moslem who is making the transition from middle-aged to elderly, Yussef is one of the few individuals in his community who has earned the trust of members of the Moslem, Christian and Jewish congregations. Accordingly, he is occasionally called upon to play the role of what could be called --- for lack of a better term --- a "detective." And indeed, as with the other books in the series, there is a mystery within THE FOURTH ASSASSIN in which Yussef becomes personally involved.

The novel moves Yussef from his more familiar --- if not entirely comfortable --- environs of the Palestinian territories into New York, where he is to speak before a U.N. conference on the condition of the Palestinian people. While somewhat reluctant to be there, the trip gives him the opportunity to visit Ala, his youngest son, who is living with two of his friends and happens to be Yussef's former students. The three young men --- along with another friend --- jokingly call themselves the Assassins, named for a group from a time long ago.

Yussef had been looking forward to seeing all of them; his joy, however, is abruptly dashed when he discovers the decapitated body of one of Ala's roommates. Ala refuses to provide an alibi, and, to his father's horror, is arrested. Yussef understandably becomes obsessed with clearing his son's name and finding the real killer, whom he may have inadvertently spotted shortly after finding the corpse. Hamza Abayat, the NYPD homicide detective (and a Palestinian by birth) assigned to the case, almost instantly acquires a quiet respect for Yussef but is only interested in going wherever the evidence takes him --- whether it leads to Ala or otherwise.

And if he does not have enough to worry about, an adversary of Yussef's is at the U.N. conference, determined to ruin his reputation. Yussef --- physically frail beyond his years and emotionally wrought from all he has experienced --- is not out of his league but is nonetheless in danger of being overwhelmed. Fortunately, Khamis Zeydan, Bethlehem's police chief and Yussef's longtime friend, is also attending the conference as the head of a security detail. Zeydan is able to provide expertise and an emotionally balanced outlook for his friend as well as some dark humor, courtesy of his frequently irreverent observations.

The trail to the establishment of Ala's innocence is a complex one, but Rees is a surefooted guide who takes his characters slowly through a wealth of plot elements, which may (or may not) include honor killings, drug dealing, political intrigue, and the fourth of Ala's friends. Yussef, trying desperately to clear Ala, is in danger as much for what he knows as for what he does not. Nonetheless, he plows ahead on all fronts, knowing that even if he proves his son's innocence, someone close to both of them will be guilty.

Yes, there is a mystery in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN. But, as with the other books in the series, the mystery, even as it propels the narrative, soon takes second fiddle to the wondrous way that Rees evenhandedly explores the nuances of the uneasy relationships that exist within the diverse communities that claim their homelands as the basis for their religions. It is these relationships --- often even more internally complex than externally --- that give rise both to the mystery and to its resolution in each book. Rees truly gets into the emotions of his characters, even as the stories are told entirely from Yussef's viewpoint.

Take a look at the first four pages or so. The book begins with Yussef, newly arrived in the United States, climbing the stairs of the Fourth Avenue subway exit in Brooklyn in the heart of Little Palestine. Much is familiar, and much is different. I may have read better written passages recently, but I don't think I have read any that I have loved as much as the ones contained in these opening pages. This is classic work that will stand up 20 or 30 years from now when you (maybe) and I (almost certainly) are gone, and the problems that currently exist will still remain. Brilliantly conceived and beautifully written, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN is strongly recommended.