Another Omar

I read his first book and was pleasantly surprised because I wrongly assumed the writing would be quite pro-Pal. But it wasn't. And now Matt Rees has a third: THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET.



Here's from a book review, The Sacred and the Profane by MARILYN STASIO

...Rees’s modest protagonist, an aging Palestinian schoolteacher named Omar Yussef, is no one’s idea of a hero...THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET finds Omar Yussef in Nablus, helping his friend Sami Jaffari, a lieutenant with the national police, investigate the theft of a priceless Torah scroll (said to be the oldest book in the world) from a Samaritan sect’s synagogue. The mystery deepens when the son of the Samaritan priest is found murdered outside the sacred temple at the top of Mount Jerizim [that should be G'rizim]. Both Sami and Omar Yussef find themselves in turbulent political waters when they learn that the victim was the personal financial adviser to the late Palestinian president and was involved in the embezzlement of millions of dollars in Western aid...

...He tries persuasion on a young Hamas soldier, debates a fierce sheik with “a frown like a thousand fatal fatwas” on the question of moral tolerance, and confronts his own son for becoming an “adherent of a crazy, hard-line version of our religion.” But he finds no joy in Nablus until he goes to Sami’s wedding, where the sounds of music and laughter finally drown out all the sad and angry voices.