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

[Matt Rees]

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 will make New Yorkers see their city in a different way. Here's the review:

"New Yorkers are bound to be startled by the views of their city advanced by Matt Beynon Rees in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN (Soho). 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."

[Jon Loomis]

Congratulations, Matt. This will definitely sell some books.

[Benjamin Sobieck]

Nice! A NYT review is huge.

[I. J. Parker]

Congrats on a NYT book review. I like Stasio.