MattRees.net

I talk about the real events in Gaza that are the basis for my second Palestinian crime novel A GRAVE IN GAZA (UK title: THE SALADIN MURDERS.) Over a decade reporting on Gaza, I accumulated stories that few other reporters noticed. In this novel, Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef faces the corruption of senior Palestinian security [...]

My award-winning first novel was THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM (UK title: THE BETHLEHEM MURDERS). Set against the backdrop of the Palestinian intifada, it tells the story of schoolteacher Omar Yussef, who is forced to take on the violence of his hometown to save a former pupil. In this podcast, I lay out how I came [...]

My UK publisher Atlantic is bringing out a special omnibus edition ebook of the first three Omar Yussef novels in my Palestine Quarter. Let’s call it an Omarnibus. The first of these books, The Bethlehem Murders (US title: The Collaborator of Bethlehem), won the Crime Writers Association New Blood Dagger. It introduces Omar Yussef, a [...]

Nablus is my favorite Palestinian town. Yet when I set my third novel The Samaritan’s Secret in Nablus, I discovered many Westerners had never heard of it. Here are some of the locations I used for the book.

The Jerusalem Post highlights the investigation by my new alternative news venture DeltaFourth into Yasser Arafat’s murder. JPost writer Rachel Marder interviews me about The Murder of Yasser Arafat and writes that Matthew Kalman and I have a “compelling explanation [for] the 75-year-old leader’s death near Paris in November 2004 based on years of reporting [...]

Whenever a novelist’s biography tells me that he’s “working on a screenplay,” my heart falls. I feel pity for the poor fellow who’s no doubt heading for disappointment (most scripts don’t get made) and for the novel, which exerts such a lesser lure than the glamour of the movies that a perfectly good novelist will [...]

Adam Lebor, a superb thriller-writer in his own right, picks some top summer thriller reads in the Financial Times this week (where there’s also a big profile of Lee Child). Adam very kindly includes one of my Omar Yussef mysteries, The Saladin Murders (US title: A Grave in Gaza). Here’s what he writes: There are [...]

The excellent UK crime fiction blog Crime Time features a guest post from me today. I write about how my initial ideas and research for my historical thriller MOZART’S LAST ARIA grew out of my attempts to soothe the trauma of covering the Palestinian intifada as a foreign correspondent.

My experience as a foreign correspondent throughout the Middle East places me uniquely to understand the ‘Arab Spring’ freedom movement sweeping the region. ‘Damascus Trance’ is an original short story about the violent current events in the Syrian capital. In this podcast I read the story in full and explain why my fictional response to [...]

I hope you all like the headline. I think it ought to rate well on search engines. See how technological I’ve become? The coming week will see the unveiling of my new podcast. I’ll be podcasting as The Man of Twists and Turns, which is the title of my own blog (and the identifier Homer [...]