MattRees.net

Crime novelists generally write a novel a year. It’s what publishers want. Some big writers—and I mean, 25 million books sold—have told me their publishers and agents complain that if they don’t produce a book a year their readers will forget them. In the case of such writers, some of those 25 million may have [...]

If you’ve been wondering why the people of Tunisia and Egypt have risen up against their dictators and why it caught Washington with pants down, it’s because you didn’t read THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, the latest of my Palestinian crime novels. In THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which was published exactly a year ago, my Palestinian sleuth Omar [...]

The crime novel tradition seems to have little connection to love. Maybe sometimes love in a perverse sense is the spur to the murder at the heart of most crime novels – the spurned husband killing his wife, for example. But usually the detective is a loveless loner, pining without much hope like the great [...]

Declan Burke runs an excellent blog on Irish crime writing. He also reviews for The Irish Times. Today the Times has this very gratifying review of my latest novel, along with write-ups of the new ones from Kate Atkinson, Don Winslow and Conor Fitzgerald, among others: “Matt Rees’s protagonist Omar Yussef generally prowls the mean [...]

In The Jerusalem Report, Avi Hoffmann writes a very favorable review of my latest, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN. “Former top journalist turned novelist, Rees has ventured out of Palestine this time, but uses his finely honed reporting skills to elicit the flavor of a little corner of Palestine in Brooklyn, where women wear the hijab and [...]

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 [...]

In this weekend’s Sunday Times reviewer John Dugdale describes my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef as “one of the most beguiling of current sleuths.” You can read the roundup in full at Times Online, but here’s the bit about my newest novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN: Set in a pulsating, multicultural city, Matt Rees’s The Fourth Assassin [...]

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 [...]

Kingsley Amis said that “a bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil your lunch.” That’s because Kingsley, bless his vindictive old heart, was probably too busy spoiling someone else’s. Believe me, a bad review leaves a bad taste all day long. That’s not because of any insecurity about my [...]