Series: Omar Yussef Mysteries | Publication Date: February 1, 2008
Praise for the Omar Yussef series:
“The Collaborator of Bethlehem is readable and literate, and offers a vivid portrait of Palestinian life today.”—The Washington Post
“Matt Beynon Rees has taken a complex world of culture clash and suspicion and placed upon it humanity.”—David Baldacci, author of The Collectors
“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
“The Collaborator of Bethlehem is the best—and the rarest—sort of mystery: exciting and compelling, but it is also a deeply moving story that will, for many readers, shed much light on the conditions in the Palestinian territories.”—David Liss, author of The Ethical Assassin and A Conspiracy of Paper
“Uncovers the gritty, often disturbing human realities of life in Palestinian society. . . . [Rees] gives his characters heart as he gives his readers a thrill.”—TIME.com
“An evocative, compassionate tale.”—San Francisco Chronicle
As he tries to save the lives of two men, Omar Yussef is confronted with the corruption and violence of Gaza’s warring government factions and the criminal gangs with which they are connected.
Matt Beynon Rees was born in South Wales. He was previously the Jerusalem bureau chief for TIME magazine, where he is currently a contributor. He is the author of one previous mystery in the Omar Yussef series, The Collaborator of Bethlehem, and the nonfiction work Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East. He lives in Jerusalem.
Matt Beynon Rees is the former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time. His Omar Yussef mysteries include The Collaborator of Bethlehem (winner of the Crime Writers' Association New Blood Dagger Award) and A Grave in Gaza. He is also the author of the nonfiction work Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East. Born in Wales, he lives in Jerusalem and maintains a website at www.mattbeynonrees.com.
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...
This review is from: Grave in Gaza (Omar Yussef Mysteries) (Hardcover)
As someone raised in the Arab world and a fan of the crime genre, I'd long been awaiting something like Rees' first Omar Yussef mystery, last year's The Collaborator of Bethlehem. That debut wasn't flawless, but on the whole, was a very promising start to the Palestine/Israel-set series. Now 50-something former alcoholic Omar Yussef returns for another mystery, this time in Gaza. Employed as a principal and schoolteacher in a U.N. refugee school on the West Bank, the story finds him accompanying his Swedish boss on an inspection tour of U.N. schools in Gaza.
Upon entering Gaza, they are joined by a Scottish U.N. security officer, ex-soldier James Cree. Almost instantly, the trio are plunged into the confusing briar patch of Gaza politics, as they take on the case of a local U.N. schoolteacher who has been arrested by one of the several local police/military/intelligence forces. This also coincides with large meeting of Palestinian bigwigs and power brokers, providing an excuse for Omar Yussef's friend from Bethlehem, Brigadier Khamis Zeydan to be on hand, along with his mysterious local fixer, Sami. Zeydan warns his friend and the U.N. men that everything in Gaza is connected, and if you start tugging at one case, you'll find yourself unraveling all kind of things best left untouched.
Of course they continue in the face of his warning and are soon embroiled in a very complicated power-play between various Gaza factions. The story becomes increasingly ruthless and violent, and as in the previous book, those who do not want to face the reality of Palestinian factionalism, pervasive corruption, and intercinine bloodshed, will find this a trying read. The one main flaw in the book is one I've encountered in other series set in unusual places, and that is overexplaining. The problem facing the knowledgeable or native author is that they know all the ins and outs of their setting, but the reader will not. So, the simplest solution is to involve some kind of foreign characters (here, the two U.N. men), who act as stand-ins for the Western reader, and provide some kind of pretext for other native characters to deliberately explain things to them. In a very real sense, Omar Yussef is an outsider here as well, and the story depends a little too much on fixer Sami arranging things. Another minor flaw is that it's often unclear who is speaking in what language. This is actually somewhat important to the story, since the Swede speaks no Arabic, the Scot a little, and Omar Yussef is supposed to act as translator. However, in many of the meetings throughout the book, I had to stop and reread to figure out who could understand what portions of the conversation.
Despite these various quibbles, the book is another solid entry in a series that doesn't shy away from the ugly realities of life as a Palestinian. Crammed with details from the personal (such as food, family, and daily life) to the political, it offers a perspective of Gaza one simply can't get from news accounts.
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This review is from: Grave in Gaza (Omar Yussef Mysteries) (Hardcover)
Matt Rees' second Omar Yussef book will not disappoint fans of The Collaborator of Bethlehem, nor anyone interested in learning a little about the small battles Palestinians must fight every day just to survive. As in both his first novel and his earlier non-fiction book about the area, Cain's Field, Rees, thrifty with words, gives us a multi-layered and nuanced view of the world he depicts. Rees' Gaza is controlled by gangsters masquerading as politicians, where few good deeds go unpunished and good people try their best to cope. Unable though trying to bring about much good, Omar Yussef, the book's protagonist, instead pursues truth, and on the way finds that and irony. I do not want to give away the story, but I'll vouch that is a page turner that will please both mystery and Middle East book fans.
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This review is from: Grave in Gaza (Omar Yussef Mysteries) (Hardcover)
In the early pages of Matt Beynon Rees' new book, "A Grave in Gaza," one its characters observes that in the political and social devastation of today's Gaza territory "there is no single, isolated crime (here). Each one is linked to many others...when you touch one of them, it sets off reverberations that will be felt by powerful people, ruthless people." This is expressed as a friendly warning to the book's protagonist, Omar Yussuf Sirhan (Abu Ramiz), the principled teacher turned-detective, who travels to Gaza from the West Bank on a routine school inspection and finds himself trying to save first an imprisoned Palestinian whistleblower and very quickly after, his friend and kidnapped UN colleague, Magnus Wallender. Driven by personal decency and a sense of moral outrage, Omar Yussuf plunges into a labyrinth of gang warfare and dueling warlords on behalf of his colleagues and almost loses his own liberty and life.
Author Rees deftly uses Omar Yussuf's pursuit of his colleagues' liberation to take a hard look at the pervasive corruption and physical degeneration that characterize life in Gaza for all those trapped in that small territory. Rees enhances his novel with impressive explanations of the history of the area and, more interestingly, with one wonderful character study after another. The author's graphic and continuing description of the ever-present dust storms and what they do the human disposition and the physical landscape, are highly effective and extremely discomforting. As intricate and good as the plot is in this novel, the character studies and descriptions of the place are even better. This is an insightful and wise book that is rich with wonderful writing. Highly recommended.
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