MattRees.net

I haven’t written anything about what we might call the flotilla fiasco. And I’m not going to do so. Here’s why: The Jerusalem Post reviews THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, the latest of my Palestinian crime novels, this week. Ilana Teitelbaum writes: “As in the previous novels, a seemingly isolated instance of murder is revealed to be [...]

Since 9/11, journalists and writers have tried to understand the extremists committed to the destruction of the West and, often, that of their own societies in the Middle East. Writers have mostly done this by “going inside” the world of those extremists, giving us the inner life of suicide bombers or of the “American Taliban.” [...]

Las Vegas City Life reviewer Tod Goldberg comes up with a compelling reading of my new Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN this week. Here’s a little of what Tod writes: “As in his previous novels, Rees has steeped The Fourth Assassin in the mire of present day politics and religion while showing that most [...]

Top crime fiction blog Gumshoe Review rates my new Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN very highly: “Rees does an excellent job of showing the pressures on the young Palestinians and describing the microcosm of one immigrant community within the U.S. The mystery also contains plenty of twist and turns.” Read Mel Jacobs’s full review. [...]

The first line of a great novel tends also to have a lot of punch — to “grab” you. My favorite is “The Sun Also Rises,” which manages to tell you a great deal about one of the main characters, but even more about the narrator: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. [...]

New Yorkers tend to have a “seen it all” attitude to life. It’s not surprising, given the madhouse that is the Big Apple. But I’ve now officially done something that’ll shock them. In The New York Times Book Review’s crime fiction roundup by Marilyn Stasio, my new novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN is called “engrossing.” It’s [...]

My new Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN is one of five “This Week’s Hot Reads” on The Daily Beast, which also happens to be the hot read of the web these days. The Beast writes of the book and its Brooklyn setting: “Rees paints a meticulous portrait of the post-9/11 community of Little Palestine [...]

I’ve been called the Dashiell Hammett of Palestine, the John Le Carre of the Middle East, the James Ellroy of…Palestine, the Graham Greene of Jerusalem, and the Georges Simenon of the Palestinian refugee camps. Depends which review you happen to have read. I’ve published three previous novels about Omar Yussef, my Palestinian schoolteacher/sleuth. Omar has [...]

The Campaign for the American Reader blog empire’s flagship is the Page 69 Test. The premise is this: open any book to page 69; if it grabs you, that’s a better indication of whether you’ll enjoy the book than simply reading the opening page. Try it on a book you like (and one you don’t), [...]

Often a novelist can humanize foreign affairs in ways a journalist can’t. To mark publication today of my new Palestinian crime novel The Fourth Assassin, I posted this for my regular column on GlobalPost. Though we do so at our peril, overseas events are easy to ignore. We flip past the foreign pages of the [...]