Matt Rees

Matt Rees is a Welsh novelist and journalist. He is the author of The Palestine Quartet, a series of crime novels about Omar Yussef, a Palestinian sleuth, and of historical crime novels. He is the winner of a Crime Writers Association Dagger for his crime fiction and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for fiction. His latest novel is the international thriller The Damascus Threat, the first in a series about an agent with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

His first book was a work of nonfiction, Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East in 2004 (Free Press), about Israeli and Palestinian societies.

The New York Times called The Collaborator of Bethlehem, the first of his Palestinian crime novels about Bethlehem sleuth Omar Yussef, “an astonishing first novel.” 'Le Figaro called the book “a masterpiece.” Rees's writing has been compared with the work of Graham Greene, John Le Carre, Georges Simenon and Henning Mankell. The French magazine L’Express called him “the Dashiell Hammett of Palestine.” Rees's books have sold in 25 languages.

Rees was born in Newport, Wales. As a journalist, Rees covered the Middle East for over a decade and lived in Jerusalem for 20 years. He was TIME's Jerusalem bureau chief from 2000 until 2006, writing award-winning stories about the Palestinian intifada. He also worked as Middle East correspondent for The Scotsman and Newsweek.

Rees published a nonfiction account of Israeli and Palestinian society called Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East in 2004 (Free Press). His first crime novel, The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title The Bethlehem Murders), was published in the U.S. in February 2007 and is set in Bethlehem, West Bank, against the backdrop of the Palestinian intifada. It involves the gangs of gunmen operating in the town and the situation of the Christian Palestinian minority. It won the Crime Writers Association John Creasey New Blood Dagger in 2008, and was also named one of the Top 10 Mysteries of the Year by Booklist and, in the UK Sir David Hare made it his Book of the Year in The Guardian. His sleuth Omar Yussef was called “Philip Marlowe fed on hummus” by one reviewer and “Yasser Arafat meets Miss Marple” by another.

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