Reviews in Sussex, Abu Dhabi and...Loonland

[Matt Rees]

In the lastest issue of the West Sussex County Times, my new Palestinian crime novel "The Samaritan's Secret" gets this lovely review:
"If you haven't yet entered the colourful, chaotic, tragi-comic world of amateur Palestinian detective Omar Yussef, then take a satisfying plunge with the third in this genre-busting crime series. With a race-against-time plot involving missing millions, a dying religious sect, fanatical political leaders and a corrupt police force, the real story turns out to be forbidden love and the difficult relationship between fathers and sons. Yussef, overweight history teacher and doting grandfather, seems to bungle his way through the mystery, but like a latter day Miss Marple, he knows more than he lets on - and his innocence carries him through.

In the Abu Dhabi newspaper "The National" THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET also gets an excellent review. Here's a little of it:
'Rees’s ambitions for the genre are lofty. As Omar sadly notes: “Detectives are like the cloth that polishes a tarnished piece of silverware. The silver is displayed proudly, shining and admired. The cloth is tossed into a cupboard, filthy and unseen, imprinted with a record of the dirt everyone else believes to have been erased forever.” The Samaritan’s Secret is the third in Rees’s award-winning Omar Yussef series, and at its supple best it illuminates the kind of complexities that get lost in everyday reporting.'

The BookLoons blog reviews THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET. Here's what reviewer Tim Davis writes:
"As an enthusiastically recommended murder mystery that has an intriguing plot, complex characterizations, compelling themes, and fascinating settings, The Samaritan's Secret goes a step further in being an usually vivid and candid portrayal of what might be the most complicated, least understood, and most regularly vilified cultural and political environment in the world - the Palestinian Mideast."