MattRees.net

At one of the Bethlehem locations from my first novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title The Bethlehem Murders) with a group of Norwegian visitors who posted some brief videos. This one is in Dehaisha Refugee Camp outside the UN school where my fictional sleuth Omar Yussef teaches.

At one of the Bethlehem locations from my first novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title The Bethlehem Murders) with a group of Norwegian visitors who posted some brief videos. This one is in Dehaisha Refugee Camp and we’re talking about Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader.  

At one of the Bethlehem locations from my first novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title The Bethlehem Murders) with a group of Norwegian visitors who posted some brief videos. This one is in Beit Jala, looking across the deep wadi at Jerusalem and talking about the gunbattles that used to take place there.

A delightful show on Michigan/Indiana Public Television Dinner and a Book features chat about my novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem and how to make Palestinian recipes which appear in the book. There’s a delicious fattoush salad. What a great idea for a show!

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 [...]

My new novel, MOZART’S LAST ARIA, is out May 1 in the UK. I’ll be writing more about it in the next week. Set in Vienna in 1791, Nannerl Mozart, the talented sister of the great composer, tracks clues about Wolfgang’s death. She comes to believe that he was murdered and his last opera The [...]

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 [...]

A book takes a long time to write, and then it takes a while to sell. And another while to sell in another country, and another after that. So a writer’s smile spreads across time. My long-term grin widened this weekend, when I signed with my UK publisher for my next two books. Not only [...]

Me and My Big Mouth is the blog of the inimitable Scott Pack, the most innovative (and, to many, the most controversial) man in British publishing. We met a year ago in freezing Oslo, tramped through the snow to the Ibsen Museum, and generally had a great time. It’s possible we were the only teetotallers [...]

The dead man’s mother raged and cried as she told me how she’d discovered her son’s body, in the cabbage patch outside her home. She’d gone down on her knees, she said, touched his blood and wiped her fingers on her face and called out that God is most great. As the winter wind came [...]