Series: Omar Yussef Mysteries | Publication Date: February 1, 2009
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
“Exciting and compelling, but it is also a deeply moving story.”—David Liss
“Offers a vivid portrait of Palestinian life today.”—The Washington Post
“A beautifully written story.”—Anne Perry
“An evocative, compassionate tale.”—San Francisco Chronicle
A member of the tiny but ancient Samaritan community has been murdered. The dead man controlled hundreds of millions of dollars of government money. If the World Bank cannot locate it within the next several days, all aid money to the Palestinians will be cut off. Visiting Nablus, Omar Yussef must solve the murder and find the money, or all Palestinians will suffer.
Matt Beynon Rees was born in South Wales. He has covered the Middle East as a journalist for over a decade and was TIME magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief from 2000 to 2006. He is the author of the nonfiction work Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide and Fear in the Middle East and two previous mysteries in the Omar Yussef series.
*Starred Review* Rees makes it three for three with his latest Omar Yussef mystery. This time the Bethlehem history teacher is in strife-torn Nablus to attend the wedding of a family friend. Nablus is home to the small Samaritan community, which follows its ancient traditions in the midst of the ongoing violence between Palestinians and Israelis. Yussef, ever the historian, jumps at the chance to visit the Samaritan synagogue and learn more about their beliefs, but he is quickly engulfed in a murder investigation. One of the Samaritans, a young man who worked for Arafat (“the old president”) and controlled millions of the leader’s under-the-table money, has been murdered, and the funds are missing. Yussef throws himself into the daunting task of following the money and thus stopping the World Bank from cutting off aid to Palestine. As in The Collaborator of Bethlehem (2007) and A Grave in Gaza (2008), Rees not only offers a perceptive look at complex international political issues but also help us to understand those issues in the context of everyday lives—of Palestinians attempting to dodge bullets coming in all directions (from Israelis but also from rival factions within their own country) and carry on with the business of falling in love, marrying, raising children. Constantly at risk from all manner of idealists with guns, Yussef soldiers on, his concern for individual human lives standing in stark contrast to the world around him. --Bill Ott
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: Samaritan's Secret (Omar Yussef Mysteries) (Hardcover)
If you enjoyed Matt Benyon Rees' first two Omar Yussef novels, you want to buy this one. It is another page turner, this time exploring the interplay between Hamas and Fatah in the West Bank town of Nablus as Omar Yussef is driven to solve the murder of the son of the religious leader of the small Samaritan tribe. If you want to learn about Palestine and its people, these novels are as good a place as any to start-- and you get some great detective stories too.
Omar Yussef mysteries give a reader much more than a crime and its solution. They put human faces on Palestinians living in a limbo between occupation and statehood, with their own law enforcement agencies working under the shadow (or, if you prefer, watchful eye) of the Israelis. The stories though are all about the Palestinians. There is not a word of dialog or even a name put to any Israeli, allowing the characters to show the diversity in Palestinians' opinions, outlook and standards of living. Rees is a former Middle East reporter with great powers of observation, and his novels, through the words and descriptions of the characters, give their readers a better education about the problems of Palestine than a month of 90 second reports on cable news about the day to day events there. No one will be offended by anything in these books, and everyone will be informed.
I have heard that Rees' books are to be translated into Hebrew. I hope they are on sale in Israel soon, and that they will also be available in Arabic. These books deserve far more attention than they have received.
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This review is from: Samaritan's Secret (Omar Yussef Mysteries) (Hardcover)
The chronicle of Omar Yussef Sirhan, Palestinian school master cum detective, continues with the well-written "The Samaritan's Secret." Author Matthew Beynon Rees, a British journalist with long experience in the Middle East, has a deep and almost uncanny understanding of Palestine, its people and culture, all of which are well-reflected in this crime novel and the two others in the Omar Yussef series. To his great credit, the evocative descriptions of the West Bank (and Gaza previously) and its people are both "warts and all" and admiring.
"The Samaritan's Secret" takes Omar Yussef and his family to the northern West Bank town of Nablus for the wedding of a young policeman friend and his fiance, Meimoun (introduced in "A Grave in Gaza"). The couple's marriage ceremony coincides with an outbreak of hostilities between Hamas and Fatah militants which provides the dangerous backdrop for the murder mystery that is introduced early in the story.
While Omar Yussef is visiting a shrine of the fast-dwindling Samaritan sect where the theft of sacred religious books has been reported, the body of badly beaten young man is found. The victim turns out to be the adopted son of the chief priest of the Samaritans--a man who is strangely ambivalent about his son's death and the theft of the religious articles.
The murdered man was also a close confidant of the late PLO Chief, Yasser Arafat, and apparently held the secret to the whereabouts of hundreds of millions of international assistance dollars stashed in overseas banks for Arafat's personal use. There is a general belief among the Nablus population that the young victim was also gay and may have had relationships with a number of important figures in the Palestinian state. All of this seems to contribute to a violent and extremely dangerous feeding frenzy that threatens Omar Yussef and his friends and family as he attempts to solve the murder of the young Samaritan.
In addition to a clever and every-changing plot line, author Beynon Rees has gone to great and very effective lengths to describe Omar Yussef's relationships with family and friends. While Omar Yussef represents honor and justice, he is also shown to be a middle-aged man with a lot of physical problems, some the result of an alcoholic and violent past. He and his long-time friend, Bethlehem police chief, Khamis Zeydan, are a sad/funny team of grumpy old men, who persist against the formidable odds to solve what becomes a series of murders, before returning to the scene of the original crime for the final denouement.
This is terrific read with lots of twists and turns and surprises up to the final page. Beynon Rees deserves great credit for presenting his story with authentic sounding, no sugar-coated descriptions of the time, place and people that are the West Bank today.
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This review is from: Samaritan's Secret (Omar Yussef Mysteries) (Hardcover)
Think Chandler when you read this detective novel. One character in the book even prompts us at intervals by telling us that Chandler is who she is reading. This kind of detective story is nothing like Agatha Christie, and not really much more like certain modern practitioners of the genre, say Ian Rankin. Indeed the main focus is not even on the detection element at all. As in the seven Philip Marlowe novels, it is the characters themselves and the background against which they are drawn that are the things that matter more.
There is one respect at least in which you might even think that The Samaritan's Secret compares well with Chandler, and that respect is the clarity of the plot. Chandler did not want his novels to be read or assessed as mere whodunits, and he admitted candidly that he was well into his stories before he even made up his mind who the killer would turn out to be. Myself, I adore Chandler. When I was young I knew the seven novels nearly by heart, and to this day I can't follow the plot of any of them. No such problem with The Samaritan's Secret. The range of possibilities is very restricted (although there are some genuine surprises), and the truth emerges at least as much through candour and loquacity on several people's part as through any `detecting' that Omar Yussef does.
Is it all a bit oversimplified and schematic? I guess it probably is, although I greatly enjoyed it. Matt Rees has long experience as a journalist covering the Middle East, and so can be expected to have more insight into the cultures and ways of thinking in that tortured region than most of us have. The characters are rather two-dimensional, but that may actually be a good thing in a novel of only 300 or so pages. What is important is that they should be distinctive, and I give Rees good marks for that. The principal character is, obviously, Omar Yussef himself, whom I have seen compared to Morse and Rebus. I think we need more time and more books before we can really judge whether that comparison holds. The comparison that the author implicitly invites is between his `hero' and Marlowe, and what they share in common, for all their obvious dissimilarities, is stubbornness and mental honesty.
The streets that Omar Yussef goes down are even meaner than those in Marlowe's Los Angeles. The participants' daily diet of deception, vengeance, violence and death is depicted with a light touch, and I suppose it has to be that way, otherwise it would overwhelm and submerge the detective-story element. However when a British writer presumes to get inside the heads of the inhabitants of such a region it is more or less impossible to purge the narrative of a certain patronising condescension, however unintended that may be. I would expect this story to find many appreciative and admiring readers all the same, and I shall be interested to see how much mileage this new hero and his ambience turn out to have in them.
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