A GRAVE IN GAZA
by Matt Beynon Rees
An inspection of UN schools in the Gaza refugee camps turns as deadly as the landscape itself.
Omar Yussef Sirhan (The Collaborator of Bethlehem, 2007) couldn’t be sorrier that he agreed to accompany the United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s Magnus Wallender to Gaza. Unlike his peaceful home in Bethlehem, where his beloved wife Maryam fusses to prepare his meals, Gaza is a place of punishing dust storms and desperate poverty. It doesn’t help that as soon as they arrive, they discover that Eyad Masharawi has been arrested after accusing Prof. Adnan Maki of Al-Azhar University, where Masharawi served as adjunct, of granting unearned degrees to members of Colonel al-Fara’s Preventive Security forces. Soon after, Wallender is kidnapped by members of a shadowy militia called the Saladin Brigade who demand the release of Bassam Odwan, jailed for killing Fathi Salah of Military Intelligence, which is led by General Husseini, al-Fara’s rival. Then James Cree, Gaza’s UN security officer, is killed by a roadside bomb. But as Omar Yussef’s childhood friend, expatriate Bethlehem police chief Khamis Zeydan, tells him, no crime in Gaza stands on its own. And when UN negotiators decide that Gaza is too risky for them, it’s up to him to untangle the skein of misdeeds in hopes of winning Wallender’s freedom.
Gaza, where nothing is as it seems, is the perfect setting for the puzzle Sirhan’s second in a series offers.