The Man of Twists and Turns

During my tour of Germany — well, more of a quick swing through the west, having had a vacation in Berlin — I stopped in at the excellent DRadio Wissen, a fairly new branch of Deutschlandfunk. These ladies, lead by the lovely Lena Staerk, certainly were quite funky. Also cosmopolitan, broadcasting for nearly two hours [...]

The Irish Times has a thought-provoking article today under the headline “How the world became one big crime scene.” It’s by Declan Burke, ace Irish crime fictioneur and also one of the most active bloggers on the subject. You’ll find reference to my Palestinian sleuth, Omar Yussef, but Dec also delves into other areas of [...]

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 [...]

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 horrific [...]

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 [...]

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 writing. [...]

The Forward profiles me and my series of Palestinian crime novels this week, calling it a “unique mystery series.” I’m very happy that their correspondent Amy Klein picked up on a particular point I made in our interview: “The thing not to lose sight of is that these are crime novels; they are entertaining. They [...]

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.
If [...]

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 [...]