The Fourth Assassin (Omar Yussef Series #4) »

Matt Beynon Rees was born in South Wales. He has covered the Middle East as a journalist for over a decade, including five years as Time magazine's Jerusalem bureau chief. He is the author of the nonfiction work Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East, and three previous mysteries in the Omar Yussef series.

Omar Yussef investigates a mystery in the Palestinian community in Brooklyn.

Publishers Weekly

The relentless cycle of violence and retribution follows Palestinian detective Omar Yussef to New York City, where he must deliver a speech at the U.N. on schooling in the Palestinian refugee camps, in Rees's excellent fourth mystery (after 2009's The Samaritan's Secret). When Yussef's son, Ala, is arrested after a decapitated body is found in Ala's Brooklyn apartment, Yussef's search for the real killer leads him from Atlantic Avenue to Coney Island and back to the U.N. Secretariat. In the process, he discovers that he's not quite the cosmopolitan man he thought himself to be, a realization shared by many Arab immigrants in the story. In truth, the residents of Little Palestine are caught between its subterranean mosques and the lure of Manhattan, where forbidden pleasures are ready for the plucking. Yussef remains reliably human and compassionate toward human fallibility, while raging openly at the corruption of his own leaders. (Feb.)