The Samaritan’s Secret by Matt Beynon Rees
The Samaritan’s Secret by Matt Beynon Rees. © 2009 Soho Crime. ISBN 9781569475454. Hardback. Mystery/Crime. 288 pages. $24.00 US. [ Purchase ]
Source: Amazon Purchase
Synopsis
A member of the tiny but ancient Samaritan community has been murdered. The dead man controlled hundreds of millions of dollars of government money. If the World Bank cannot locate it within the next several days, all aid money to the Palestinians will be cut off. Visiting Nablus, Omar Yussef must solve the murder and find the money, or all Palestinians will suffer. {from amazon.com}
Review
I read this book with a lot of mixed feelings to begin with. The author had set the mystery in the middle of Palestine and I was wondering just how he would portray it. I knew that the author was a Middle-Eastern correspondent and it really didn’t inspire much confidence in me. I was VERY surprised and VERY impressed by what I read.
The author described the relationship between Hamas and Fateh (the two leading Palestinian factions) very well, telling the reader exactly how they interact with each other and the flaws that are very evident in each. He also described the difference between Palestinians living in Nablus and the ones living in Ramallah which shows the level of knowledge that he has in the place he chose to set his novels.
The story itself is a marvel, it starts with the theft of a scroll and ends with the lead character Omar Yousiff saving the Palestinian state from being cut off by the world bank. The intricacies of the story have to be read to be believed and it is very well woven together.
There were two pet peeves of mine in the story but once I ignored them everything was fine. The author kept using the first two names of the lead character every time he talks about him, so its Omar Yousiff this or Omar Yousiff that, and he insists on translating the greetings verbatim instead of using the more English versions of them, which sounded weird to me. For example, good morning was morning of joy and the answer to that was morning of light and so on. On the whole they were not major things and could be lived with.
A very enjoyable story, and I will definitely be looking forward to reading the other books in the series.
Rating
5 out of 5
About the Author
Matt Beynon Rees was born in South Wales. He has covered the Middle East as a journalist for over a decade and was TIME magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief from 2000 to 2006. He is the author of the nonfiction work Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide and Fear in the Middle East and two previous mysteries in the Omar Yussef series.
