Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery - Hardcover

Rees, Matt Beynon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569476195 ISBN 13: 9781569476192

Publisher: Soho Crime, 2010

Synopsis

Arriving to visit his son in a heavily Palestinian area of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Omar Yussef discovers the beheaded body of one of the boy’s roommates. When his son is arrested as a suspect, Omar Yussef must prove his innocence.

About this title

About the Author

Matt Beynon Rees was born in South Wales. He was previously the Jerusalem bureau chief for TIME magazine and has covered the Middle East as a journalist for over a decade. He is the author of Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East, as well as four books in the Omar Yussef series. He won the Crime Writers’ Association New Blood Dagger for the first mystery in the series.

Reviews

Starred Review. 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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Road trips in crime series have the built-in problem of removing their heroes from the landscapes that define them. Rees’ Bethlehem history teacher and occasional sleuth Omar Yussef is a strong enough character to survive a temporary transplant to New York, but that’s not to say we don’t miss the vividly evoked Palestine setting. Yussef has agreed to attend a UN conference in Manhattan because it will give him a chance to see his son, Ala, who is living in Brooklyn’s Little Palestine neighborhood. The reunion is spoiled, however, when Yussef finds one of Ala’s roommates dead, the victim of what appears to be a ritual killing. With Ala a suspect, Yussef attempts to find the killer. Could the history lessons that Yussef once taught Ala and his friends have been corrupted into a contemporary suicide-assassination plot? Although the setting and the high-concept premise—the finale evokes The Manchurian Candidate—take us too far away from the small human dramas that usually drive this series, Yussef himself never loses sight of what he calls “the life that remains when politics is sluiced away like the filth a stray dog leaves in the street.” --Bill Ott

Edition details

• Publisher: Soho Crime
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1569476195
• ISBN 13: 9781569476192
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336