Matt Beynon Rees is an award-winning crime novelist who lives in Jerusalem. Major authors have compared his writing 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.”

As a journalist, Rees covered the Middle East for over a decade. He was Time magazine's Jerusalem bureau chief from 2000 until 2006, writing award-winning stories about the Palestinian intifada. He also worked as a Contributing Editor to Time and as Middle East correspondent for The Scotsman and Newsweek.

He was born in Newport, Wales, in 1967 and studied at Oxford University and the University of Maryland. He 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 by Soho Press. It won the prestigious Crime Writers Association John Creasey New Blood Dagger in 2008, and was also nominated for the Barry First Novel Award, the Macavity First Mystery Award, and the Quill Best Mystery Award. The New York Times called it “an astonishing first novel.” It was 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. Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse novels, called Rees’s Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef “a splendid creation.” Omar was called “Philip Marlowe fed on hummus” by one reviewer and “Yasser Arafat meets Miss Marple” by another.

The Omar Yussef Mystery series has been sold to leading publishers in 22 countries: the U.S., France, Italy, Britain, Poland, Spain, Germany, Holland, Israel, Portugal, Brazil, Norway, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Romania, Sweden, Iceland, Chile, Venezuela, Japan, Indonesia and Greece.

The second book in the series, A Grave in Gaza, appeared in February 2008 (and at the same time under the title The Saladin Murders in the UK). The Bookseller called it “a cracking, atmospheric read.” The third book in the series, The Samaritan’s Secret, was published in February 2009. The New Republic called it "a wonderful detective thriller."

• Telling It Like It Is

Mar. 25, 2009Avi Hoffmann , THE JERUSALEM POSThttp://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1237727537364&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

Nonfiction

• Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East 2004 (Free Press).

Omar Yussef novels

• The Collaborator of Bethlehem 2007

• A Grave in Gaza 2008

• The Samaritan's Secret 2009

• The Fourth Assassin 2010