All Blog Posts Tagged 'york' (40)

Book news and events for August and DI Horton goes on the London Underground

August is traditionally a quieter month in terms of speaking engagements for me so it is a chance to get down to some hard graft on the writing front. I'm running a little behind with the next DI Andy Horton, which will be number eleven in the series, but I am confident that I will make up time in August.

I also have two speaking engagements in August and am delighted to be giving a talk…

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Added by Pauline Rowson on August 2, 2013 at 8:09pm — No Comments

Bestselling mystery/thriller author Cheryl Bradshaw donates $1 per book to the Red Cross

It hasn't been easy watching the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy on television. Seeing images of wrecked homes and heartbroken people who have lost everything is never pleasant. But there is one remarkable thing that takes place when these things happen: we all come together, remembering who we are, and what we can do to help.

This month I will be donating $1.00 from every…

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Added by Cheryl Bradshaw on November 16, 2012 at 3:15am — No Comments

Omar Yussef predicted Cairo and Tunis

If you’ve been wondering why the people of Tunisia and Egypt have risen up against their dictators and why it caught Washington with pants down, it’s because you didn’t read THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, the latest of my Palestinian crime novels.

In THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which was published exactly a year…

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Added by Matt Rees on February 2, 2011 at 7:02pm — No Comments

Love and the crime novel

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 Marlowe for his true love to come along.

As I write more novels, I’ve noticed that love is at the heart of crime fiction. At least, mine,…

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Added by Matt Rees on October 14, 2010 at 5:56pm — 3 Comments

Hezbollah's rapture, resistance, and revolution

Here's my review of A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel — by Thanassis Cambanis (Free Press).

Most books on Hezbollah tend to focus, in one way or another, on the Lebanese Shia group’s fundamentalist politics. That’s in contrast to what strikes you as a journalist when you travel to southern Lebanon, one of the Hezbollah heartlands. There the greatest impressions are visceral. The earthquake of an Israeli…

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Added by Matt Rees on October 6, 2010 at 1:14am — No Comments

Going historical

Writing of the disdain expressed for genre novels by critics, Raymond Chandler said that there were just as many bad “literary novels” of the type favored by critics as there were bad genre stories – except that the bad literary novels didn’t get published. In other words, there’s nothing inherent in so-called genre fiction that makes it lesser than “literary” fiction.

Chandler knew what he was talking about. His great noir novels, such as “The Big Sleep”…

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Added by Matt Rees on September 1, 2010 at 6:06pm — 1 Comment

Israel Museum gets funky

I was the first journalist to interview James Snyder when he arrived in 1997 from a sinecure at New York's Museum of Modern Art to head the Israel Museum, the country's premier cultural institution.

Snyder had neat white hair, a trim build encased in a seersucker suit, and a black tie. This, in a land where dressing up means putting on a T-shirt that has sleeves. As I listened to his East Coast drawl, I took one look at him and figured he wouldn’t…

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Added by Matt Rees on August 5, 2010 at 12:32am — No Comments

Read international crime fiction instead, World Cup fans

World Cup fans, don’t fear hours of emptiness. Take up a work by an international crime fiction author. It’s the perfect replacement for your lost fix – and it’s a lot better for your soul, too.

Here’s why. As the World Cup unfolded over the last month, newspapers all over the globe were filled with articles in which journalists extrapolated from aspects of the play and team-make up of various countries to draw lessons about the politics and sociology of those…

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Added by Matt Rees on July 16, 2010 at 9:18pm — No Comments

Jimmy Carter, apartheid, hemorrhoids and Matt Beynon Rees

I often receive emails from book stores, amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and online literary sites telling me how much I’d like the novels of Matt Beynon Rees. I’m delighted to see these emails, which are based on my other purchases and interests, as only I can truly know just how much the novels of Matt Beynon Rees have changed my life. (Try them, I’m sure you’ll agree.)

Of course, I also get the occasional email informing me that if I like Matt Beynon…

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Added by Matt Rees on May 21, 2010 at 12:42am — 1 Comment

Scribe and Scholar enter world of Hamas

Stephen Farrell was sipping coffee in the office of his money changer on Salah ud-Din Street, East Jerusalem’s main commercial strip, four years ago, when Beverley Milton-Edwards entered. From his rucksack, Farrell produced a copy of a book about Islamic militants written by the Queens University Belfast professor.

“Your book saved my life when I was kidnapped in Iraq,” he said, referring to a brief period of captivity by militants in Baghdad in 2004…

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Added by Matt Rees on April 25, 2010 at 7:59pm — No Comments

Bibi’s Bedtime Book: The Secret Diary of Prime Minister Netanyahu #2

I can’t believe the extent of the corruption being uncovered in Israel’s government.

My predecessor as Prime Minister moped home from vacation yesterday – without any envelopes stuffed with cash, as far as we know -- and made a weepy statement about yet another police probe into bribery and fraud and breach of trust on his part. He’s alleged to have been in cahoots with a bunch of shady property developers, lawyers and municipal officials, so that a big, tacky…

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Added by Matt Rees on April 17, 2010 at 12:14am — No Comments

A who's who of Israeli corruption

JERUSALEM — The heads of all the crime families in New York used to get together every Wednesday night at the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. If you were looking for an Israeli parallel, you could do worse than the gym I work out at.

The Cybex Club at the David’s Citadel Hotel has a nice view of the Ottoman walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. It’s also where the legal, political and business elite come to sweat (actually, being Israelis, they…

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Added by Matt Rees on April 11, 2010 at 11:20pm — No Comments

Times thriller roundup: Omar Yussef 'most beguiling of current sleuths'

In this weekend's Sunday Times of London, reviewer John Dugdale describes my Palestinian detective 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,… Continue

Added by Matt Rees on April 5, 2010 at 6:31pm — No Comments

An Islamic Romeo and Juliet

Since 9/11, writers have tried to understand the extremists committed to the destruction of the West and, often, that of their own societies in the Middle East. Most have attempted to do this by “going inside” the world of those extremists, giving us the inner life of suicide bombers or of the “American Taliban.”

It’s a worthwhile premise, because it’s aimed at comprehending people who are frequently written off as bestial, bloodthirsty psychopaths, as though…

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Added by Matt Rees on April 2, 2010 at 8:05pm — No Comments

Israeli settler sect: Messiah is coming

GIVAT ONAN, West Bank—On this windblown outpost in the hills north of Jerusalem, a small fringe of Israeli settlers strives to bring the day of redemption promised, as they believe, in the Bible.

A controversial sect shunned by nearby Israeli settlements, the Brothers of Onan believe that by “spilling their seed” on the land of the ancient biblical Jewish homeland, they will hasten the coming of the Messiah. With the Israeli communities of the West Bank…

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Added by Matt Rees on April 1, 2010 at 6:00pm — 1 Comment

Why I love clogged Arab toilets better than Amazon Kindles

As I journey around the Middle East researching my Palestinian crime novels, I love to come upon a stinking squatting-toilet, its evacuation hole bubbling with dark, sinister turds and the air strong with the scent of barely digested, unhygienically prepared lamb kebab. I adore such a khazi on sight, because no one cleaned it up for me or tried to create an illusion that it was just like a toilet in Manhattan or Munich or my mother’s house.

That toilet is…

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Added by Matt Rees on March 12, 2010 at 12:16am — 3 Comments

Gumshoe Review: THE FOURTH ASSASSIN 'excellent'...and a list of crime fiction good, bad and pointless

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 you feel compelled to read any other…

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Added by Matt Rees on March 2, 2010 at 8:23pm — 1 Comment

How does that grab you? Great openings to new books

The first line of a top-notch novel usually has a lot of punch -- to "grab" you. My long-time 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. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn." This weekend The San Francisco Chronicle has… Continue

Added by Matt Rees on February 28, 2010 at 7:31pm — 4 Comments

New York Times Book Review: THE FOURTH ASSASSIN 'engrossing,' 'New Yorkers will be startled'

New Yorkers tend to have a "seen it all" outlook on life. Unsurprisingly, 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 also described as a novel that…

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Added by Matt Rees on February 27, 2010 at 5:01pm — 3 Comments

Inventing the Palestinian detective

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.