Matt Rees is an award-winning crime novelist. His series about Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef won a CWA Dagger. His latest novels are Mozart's Last Aria, a historical thriller about the composer's death, and A Name in Blood, a portrayal of Italian artist Caravaggio and his mysterious disappearance.One title on Rees's list of ten must-read historical thrillers:
The Silence. J. Sydney JonesRead about the other books on the list.
In this marvelous novel the real mayor of Vienna at the onset of the twentieth century, Karl Lueger, is at the heart of a conspiracy to raisebig money from the sale of the Vienna Woods and at the same time to gain political capital by blaming Jewish property developers for the destruction of the city’s beloved green belt. It’s a measure of Jones’s skill as a writer that, while his hero is a lawyer-turned-investigator of Jewish origin, the novel’s Jews are not really better or worse than the society around them. They aren’t portrayed as poor saintly victims. They’re simply part of Jones’s Vienna, as they were part of historical Vienna. There’s also a youthful role for little Ludwig Wittgenstein. For lovers of Sherlock Holmes, you can’t go wrong with Jones.
The Page 69 Test: The Silence.
Visit Matt Beynon Rees' website.
My Book, The Movie: Mozart's Last Aria.
The Page 69 Test: Mozart's Last Aria.
Writers Read: Matt Rees (December 2011).
--Marshal Zeringue
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