The Man of Twists and Turns

My new novel Mozart’s Last Aria has two great reviews on the blogs Reading Lark and Life in the Thumb. I’m delighted because these are the places readers go these days to find out what’s hot. It’s a sign of growing word-of-mouth for the novel. Reading Lark gives it an “I Love It” tag and [...]

My pal detective novelist B.R. Stateham features an interview with me on his blog In the Dark Mind of B.R. Stateham. He asked some very interesting questions about how a writer does what he does. I hope my answers are interesting too. The fabulous Campaign for the American Reader of Marshal Zeringue features me on [...]

The blog Page 69 Test asks writers to look at page 69 of their books and demonstrate if/how it’s representative of the entire work. I did this for my new novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA. Meanwhile, the book gets a fabulous review on Life is Short, Read Fast: “A powerful story with mystery, romance and amazing [...]

On the Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy arts blog, I’ve written a piece about why artistic attention is finally being paid to Nannerl Mozart, sister of the great composer and an important musical figure who was denied “greatness” because of her sex. I’m referring to the new French movie “Mozart’s Sister,” as well as some other [...]

Marshal Zeringue’s Campaign for the American reader continues with an invitation for me to speculate about which actress ought to play the lead in a movie version of my new historical crime novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA. (It’s speculation for now, because movie deals take a long time coming…) Here’s what I wrote (and here are [...]

The excellent and influential US literary blog The Road to Here has a great review of my new novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA. “Squirrelqueen” writes: If you love a good mystery the Mozart’s Last Aria is a must-read. I recommend this book to everyone.”

Fiction readers are nicer than people who follow politics, who are in turn more thoughtful than people who watch youtube. How do I come up with this ranking of raging rankness? I’ve studied the comments on some websites. Actually I’ve just read the comments following some reviews of my new historical crime novel MOZART’S LAST [...]

NPR includes my new novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA among its “outstanding selection” of paperbacks for this week, alongside books by Tea Obreht, Walter Mosley and Henning Mankell. “Critics have compared Mozart’s Last Aria to novels of historical conspiracy theories by Dan Brown and Elizabeth Kostova, while praising Rees’ sensitivity to musical and biographical detail,” NPR [...]

A couple of new blog reviews for Mozart’s Last Aria, my historical novel in which the great composer’s sister investigates his death. Iceberg Ink rates the book highly for its historical portrayal: Vienna and this entire classical era is handled with absolute precision by Rees. He gets how it should be portrayed and what it [...]

I have a guest post on the excellent Wonders and Marvels historical fiction blog. It introduces some of the story behind why I wrote Mozart’s Last Aria, my new historical crime novel. Here’s how the post starts: The last time someone shot a machine-gun at me, I remember listening to the ricochets off the nearby [...]