Murder They Write

Jonathan Freedland, alias Sam Bourne, tackles the Middle East conflict in his second gripping thriller, The Last Testament. With the Bethlehem Murders, Matt Rees has set off on a series of mysteries set in the West Bank with school teacher turned detective Omar Yussef as their central character.

The two journalists explain what prompted them to start writing thrillers and discuss the Middle East, politics and fiction.

Jonathan Freedland is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. He writes a weekly column in The Guardian, as well as a monthly piece for The Jewish Chronicle. He also presents BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series, The Long View. He is the author of Jacob’s Gift and, as Sam Bourne, of The Righteous Men and The Last Testament.

As a journalist, Matt Beynon Rees has covered the Middle East for over a decade, with the vast majority of that time spent amongst Palestinians and Israelis. He's a Contributor for Time based in Jerusalem, where he was the magazine's bureau chief from June 2000 until January 2006.

Rees published a nonfiction account of the divisions within Israeli and Palestinian societies entitled, Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East in 2004.

Bethlehem Murders is the first of a series of novels about Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef to be published by leading publishers in the U.S., France, Italy, Britain, Poland, Spain, Germany, Holland, Israel, Portugal, Brazil, Norway, Denmark and the Czech Republic.

Sponsored by the Shoresh Charitable Trust