Reviews

THE FOURTH ASSASSIN (Omar Yussef Mystery 4)

The New York Times
New Yorkers are bound to be startled by the views of their city advanced by Matt Beynon Rees in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN. In his new mystery featuring Omar Yussef, a Palestinian who teaches history at a school for girls in Bethlehem, Rees, a former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine, brings his series’s hero to New York for a conference at the United Nations. But first, Yussef visits “Little Palestine,” in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, where his youngest son lives – and stumbles onto the headless corpse of one of his son’s roommates. Over the course of an engrossing investigation conducted by a Palestinian-born New York detective, Yussef is educated in the harsh views of Arabs in some quarters of the city and exposed to the simmering anger of young Arabs like his son. Even more distressing, he sees how his Middle Eastern brethren have brought to America the same animosities that made them bad neighbors back home. — Marilyn Stasio, Full review.

The Sunday Times (London)
Set in a pulsating, multicultural city, Matt Rees’s The Fourth Assassin relocates his Palestinian series hero Omar Yussef to a wintry New York, where a UN conference provides a pretext for visiting his son Ala; but when he reaches Ala’s Brooklyn apartment, he discovers the headless body of one of his roommates. Yussef teams up with a local cop to investigate, and confirms his status as one of the most beguiling of current sleuths as they try to establish whether the victim was killed by a drug dealer, a romantic rival or an Islamist cell intent on a high-profile assassination.

The Daily Beast
Intelligent and suspenseful…Rees paints a meticulous portrait of the post-9/11 community of Little Palestine and the tension of cultures trying to co-exist. Full review.

New York Examiner
With a hint of Dan Brown’s knack for infusing history and religion into a thrilling crime and mystery novel, Matt Beynon Rees successfully tells the story of a man with strong ideas and morals who is forced to accept that even the brightest of minds can allow a life of crime to overtake them. Keeping you guessing until the very end, Rees manages to keep readers on their toes, unsure of who to trust, but always sure that Omar Yussef is the good guy, and will uncover the truth. Full review in New York Examiner

Bookreporter.com
This is classic work that will stand up 20 or 30 years from now when you (maybe) and I (almost certainly) are gone, and the problems that currently exist will still remain. Brilliantly conceived and beautifully written, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN is strongly recommended.

Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
The relentless cycle of violence and retribution follows Palestinian detective Omar Yussef to New York City, where he must deliver a speech at the U.N. on schooling in the Palestinian refugee camps, in Rees’s excellent fourth mystery…Yussef remains reliably human and compassionate toward human fallibility, while raging openly at the corruption of his own leaders.

“A unique mystery series” The Forward

Politics, drugs, and money complicate the case. Immigrants bring all the old rivalries to the U.S. Hope and a belief in the innate goodness of human nature compels Omar to solve the murder, but a much larger plot complicates his efforts….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. — Gumshoe Review.

Shotsmag (UK)
The Fourth Assassin is a real page turner, the sort of book that keeps you reading far into the night, it is also a clever and determinedly clear eyed look at the brutal and often contradictory politics of the Middle East and the culture clashes that have always been an integral part of life in the Big Apple. The first Omar Yussef novel, The Bethlehem Murders, won Matt Rees a CWA Dagger in 2008; this latest outing is good enough to make him a contender to win another.

Booklist
“High-concept thriller”

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Like the other books in this fascinating series, Beynon Rees presents the intersecting of cultures and beliefs not so much as a clash as an unstable fusion.

Seacoastonline.com, Maine
In Rees’ capable hands nothing is simple. Yussef’s, a secular humanist who rails at the corruption and violence of his own government, quickly determines he must find the murderer himself. His journey leads him deep into the undercurrents of Brooklyn’s Arab community…Since one of the strengths of this series is Yussef’s Palestinian milieu, it seemed a risk to set this fourth outing in New York, but Rees (a Welshman and a 10-year veteran of Middle East coverage) makes it work.