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Nuances are pretty hard to come by in much mainstream coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a circumstance that makes Scottish writer Matt Beynon Rees’s recent detective novels as indispensable as they are compelling. Rees, the former Jerusalem bureau chief of Time magazine, has concocted a truly singular sleuth in Omar Yussef, the 50-ish, curmudgeonly schoolteacher and Palestinian family man at the center of last year’s brilliant The Collaborator of Bethlehem and the new A Grave in Gaza. The word intifada is never mentioned in either book, but it is clearly the backdrop for Yussef’s wade into the corruption-racked intrigues that govern a place of refugee camps, rubble and unchecked gunmen.

In Collaborator, Yussef revealed that one of his former pupils, a local Christian, had not aided the Israeli security forces in assassinating a prominent resistance member. Much like the earlier novel, death and triangulation are at every turn in A Grave in Gaza. Yussef is even more of a fish out of water investigating the arrest and frame-up of a university professor as outspoken as he is, who has been accused of spying for the CIA. In the Gaza Strip, away from his Bethlehem home, Yussef has even fewer allies to help keep him alive as foreign colleagues are kidnapped, tortured and worse. If it sounds unrelentingly bleak, Rees’s writing is also shot through with humanism. The book’s lightness is arrived at in ways one might compare with Spike Lee’s best films ­— here, Rees’s excellent ear for dialogue, and his ability to portray the day-to-day interactions between his characters, builds into a calm empathy for men, women and children for whom chaos is a fact of life. K. Leander Williams