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Last update - 00:21 04/05/2008 Murder, mystery and malaise By Ina Friedman Tags: Matt Beynon Rees, Gaza A Grave in Gaza An Omar Yussef Mystery, by Matt Beynon Rees, Soho Press, 340 pages, $24 Advertisement Almost from the very first page, a sinister air permeates "A Grave in Gaza," Matt Beynon Rees' second novel featuring Omar Yussef, a Palestinian teacher turned detective. Opening with a funeral, it proceeds through two false arrests, a kidnapping, grisly forms of torture, brutal murders, gangland-style executions, and a fierce firefight - none of which, some readers may be relieved to know, involve Israelis - before climaxing in a graveyard. Even the elements seem to conspire in creating an oppressive atmosphere, for the story unfolds during an extended, suffocating sandstorm. Nor is it surprising, given the image of Gaza we imbibe from newspapers and TV clips, that nowhere in the 340 pages of this tale, told mostly from the perspective of Palestinians, does anyone ever have anything even remotely good to say about the place. Early on, for example, Khamis Zeydan, the savvy and cynical police chief of Bethlehem, who's conveniently on hand to serve as guide to the perplexed, describes Gaza as "so broken that it ought to be pulled out into the Mediterranean and sunk." To a European visitor, he explains that it "was meant to be a police state, but ended up more of a banana republic." But Zeydan's most astute observation - an admonition, really - is that "there is no single, isolated crime in Gaza. Each one is linked to many others." And it is this motif, reverberating throughout the book, that provides the key to the riddles propelling it forward. The fruit of Rees' field experience as a former Jerusalem bureau chief of Time Magazine and newly honed skills as a fiction writer, "A Grave in Gaza" - like its predecessor, "The Collaborator of Bethlehem" (2006) - is built on a classic conceit of the mystery genre. Its chief protagonist is a kindly, unassuming yet incredibly dogged Palestinian - the middle-aged history teacher Omar Yussef Sirhan, who, in the best tradition of improbable sleuths from Miss Marple to Monk, bests the pros at solving convoluted crimes. But what draws us most to this balding, bespectacled grandfather who lives in a milieu of violence, desperation and decay is his bearing as a confirmed mensch, a man of principle who seems constitutionally incapable of turning a blind eye to injustice. On the contrary, he's intent on seeing it redressed even at risk of provoking capricious strongmen or being caught in the crossfire of rival forces - official and maverick - that conduct themselves on the level of thuggery. In framing his canvas, Rees ingeniously defies our expectations of a tale set in Gaza by placing the tribulations of the occupation, as well as the influence of Islamist forces (the story takes place before the elections that brought Hamas to power), outside the bounds of his narrative. Instead, his book is an elaborate primer on how the self-styled patricians of the PLO blew their opportunity to parlay self-rule into statehood. As required of a good thriller, it is peopled by a gallery of nasty but nuanced characters, from a paunchy, sadistic security chief with a weakness for Belgian crystal to hardened militants who murder for lucre and then attempt to atone for the deed. The real villain that stalks these pages, however, is corruption, whether born of unchecked power or naked greed. In this sense, "A Grave in Gaza" operates on two levels: as clever pulp fiction imbued with subtle clues that lead to a predictably surprising ending, and as a searing commentary on Palestinian elites - new and old, native and imported - that betray the interests of their people. To round out the picture, Rees throws in well-meaning Western diplomats who hope to exert a positive influence on Gaza but are clueless about the basic facts of life there. As one sobered do-gooder sums up the lessons of his brief, life-threatening sojourn: "People from the West, like me, have a very simplistic view of what's right and wrong in the Middle East. We believe good must triumph over evil, but then we back bad men, when it's politically convenient." As we follow our protagonists swimming among the sharks, even this assessment seems an understatement. The intricate plot of "A Grave in Gaza" essentially picks up where "A Collaborator in Bethlehem" left off. In that first Omar Yussef Mystery, our intrepid hero, having hunted down a serial killer, is appointed principal of the UNWRA girls school in the Dehaishe refugee camp. It is in this capacity that he now accompanies a Jerusalem-based UN educational official, Marcus Wallender of Sweden, on a tour of UNWRA schools in the Gaza Strip. Upon crossing the Erez checkpoint, they are joined by James Cree, a UN security agent who hails from Scotland. Their mission is promptly sidetracked, however, by the news that Eyad Masharawi, a part-time teacher at a local UNRWA school and lecturer at Al-Azhar University, has been arrested by the Palestinian Preventive Security service on a trumped-up charge of espionage. A rash reformer, Masharawi made the mistake of publicly airing his suspicion that the university was selling to members of the security services diplomas, a prerequisite for their advancement up the ranks. When Wallender's request to see the detained UN employee is denied, Omar Yussef tries to enlist the aid of Al-Azhar's president, Professor Adnan Maki. But it turns out that Maki, a suave sybarite who hosts Omar Yussef for dinner in his luxurious villa, is the very man responsible for the whistle blower's arrest. In fact, he tries to enlist Omar Yussef's aid in steering the meddling UN official away from the matter. "The Swede [Wallender] is at your mercy. He doesn't speak Arabic, right? He doesn't understand the culture or the players. He knows only what you let him know," Maki coaxes his guests before shifting his appeal to baser instincts. "I can offer you incentives," he purrs lasciviously, nodding in the direction of his Sri Lankan maid. "Incentives of whatever taste you may have." We barely get a sense of how this thread will pan out, for the plot promptly veers off in a seemingly unrelated direction. First Wallender is kidnapped by militants from the Saladin Brigades to exchange for one of their members arrested by Palestinian Military Intelligence for killing one of its officers. Then, on his way to the Erez checkpoint to meet a UN team sent to negotiate Wallender's release, Cree is killed by a roadside bomb. Fearing further losses, the UN emergency team turns tail and calls on all its foreign personnel to depart Gaza, leaving Omar Yussef to try to engineer Wallender's rescue. Soon we realize, along with Omar Yussef, that these are only the initial elements of a complex equation. Mindful of Zeydan's tip that every crime in Gaza is linked to many others, he ultimately solves it by threading together a collection of opaque clues. "A Grave in Gaza" makes no pretense to be more than a cunningly crafted whodunit. But for Western and especially Israeli readers, who have been isolated from their Palestinian neighbors by fiat, fear or enmity, it humanizes a community that's largely been reduced to stereotypes and caricatures in our minds. Whether drawn as heroes or heavies, Rees' characters prove convincing, thanks to his command of nuance and close attention to detail - be it the briefly straying eye of a loyal but lonely husband far from home, or the almost comically inept behavior of foreigners whose mores are so out of place in the Gazan reality. Sometimes Rees is able to capture a character or absurdity in a single line, as in the start of a phone conversation between Omar Yussef and a woman named Nirnberger, who left a message with her phone number at his hotel (we subsequently understand that she is a UN staffer). Omar Yussef reads the message a few hours after Cree's murder, which has left him distraught and, on top of Wallender's abduction, has created a local crisis for the UN. Yet even in the throes of an emergency, it seems, certain demands of decorum cannot be allowed to lapse. Thus when Omar Yussef dials the number and the woman who answers identifies herself as Nancy, he naturally asks: "Missus Nirnberger?" "Miz Nirnberger," she curtly corrects him, as the narrator wryly informs us that "Omar Yussef wondered what that meant." At other times Rees slows the pace of the narrative to flesh out his characters more fully. Though it does nothing to advance the plot, for example, an interlude in the middle of the book is devoted to Omar Yussef's relationship with his teenaged granddaughter, who, slightly to his chagrin, has created a Web site that depicts the dignified school principal as a detective. And we find Omar Yussef returning to visit Masharawi's wife and son - even after the teacher's predicament has been outstripped by the harm that befalls Wallender and Cree - both to offer them solace and to take comfort in the warmth and simple amenities of family life as crudeness and cruelty abound around him. Touches like these, alongside the derring-do, are what engage our sentiment and make the players in this thriller memorable. And who knows? As more volumes of the series follow (two are already in the pipeline), Omar Yussef - a Third World hero in the age of the global village - may become the paragon of a crime-fighting everyman who, against the odds and common sense, cannot resist the temptation to make his world a slightly better place. Ina Friedman, a correspondent for the Dutch daily Trouw, is co-author of "Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin." 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