Crime novel offers insight into history of Palestinians

By Matt Beynon Rees.

Soho Crime. 310 pp. $24

Reviewed by Peter Rozovsky

Matt Rees' third crime novel set in the Palestinian territories is more didactic than his first two, more deliberately a lesson in Palestinian history and an attack on abuses within Palestinian politics.

Fair enough; the history into which Rees delves is little known, lost amid the area's great, headline-grabbing struggles: Israelis vs. Palestinians and Fatah vs. Hamas. And this book's setting, the city of Nablus - far more ancient than the Palestinians themselves - is far less known than Bethlehem or Gaza City. But then, a desire to get behind the headlines is what drove Rees, a former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine, out of journalism and into fiction.

"I was in a cabbage field near Bethlehem in 2003," Rees told me, "interviewing the mother and wife of a Palestinian gunman who'd been killed by Israeli snipers as he crept home to break the Ramadan fast with his family. They talked about discovering his body in the moonlight and touching his blood to their faces, but they also told me in very profound, emotional terms what it had been like to go through such an extreme experience. I remember thinking: 'This is too good for Time magazine.' "

That death formed the basis for the first killing in Rees' first novel, The Collaborator of Bethlehem. For his current book, the scenes are Nablus and the ruins of the sacred Samaritan temple that loom above on Mount Jerizim. A precious scroll belonging to the ancient sect of the Samaritans, their version of the Torah, has disappeared, been ransomed, and then returned, and a young man is found dead.

The man, it transpires, may have been the Samaritan priest's son. He also handled finances for "the Old Man," Yasir Arafat, and that gave him access to hundreds of millions of dollars intended for the Palestinian government but now disappeared into private bank accounts. If the money does not turn up within a few days, the World Bank will cut off all aid to the Palestinian territories.

The deadline for the aid cutoff provides the suspense, and the money provides the mystery. Local color, often grim, lends the novel its texture.