City of Veils: A Novel (A Katya Hijazi and Nayir Sharqi Novel) - Hardcover

Ferraris, Zoë

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316074276 ISBN 13: 9780316074278

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2010

Synopsis

Women in Saudi Arabia are expected to lead quiet lives circumscribed by Islamic law and tradition. But Katya, one of the few women in the medical examiner's office, is determined to make her work mean something.

When the body of a brutally beaten woman is found on the beach in Jeddah, the city's detectives are ready to dismiss the case as another unsolvable murder-chillingly common in a city where the veils of conservative Islam keep women as anonymous in life as the victim is in death. If this is another housemaid killed by her employer, finding the culprit will be all but impossible.

Only Katya is convinced that the victim can be identified and her killer found. She calls upon her friend Nayir for help, and soon discovers that the dead girl was a young filmmaker named Leila, whose controversial documentaries earned her many enemies.

With only the woman's clandestine footage as a guide, Katya and Nayir must confront the dark side of Jeddah that Leila struggled to expose: an underworld of prostitution, violence, exploitation, and jealously guarded secrets. Along the way, they form an unlikely alliance with an American woman whose husband has disappeared. Their growing search takes them from the city's car-clogged streets to the deadly vastness of the desert beyond.

In CITY OF VEILS, award-winning author Zoë Ferraris combines a thrilling, fast-paced mystery with a rare and intimate look into women's lives in the Middle East.

About this title

About the Author:

Zoë Ferraris moved to Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the first Gulf War to live with her then husband and his extended family of Saudi-Palestinian Bedouins, who had never welcomed an American into their lives before. She has an MFA from Columbia University and is the author of one previous novel, Finding Nouf. She lives in San Francisco.

From AudioFile:

This highly original police procedural set in contemporary Saudi Arabia fascinates as a whodunit as well as an inside look at a closed society. (Try being a veiled and cloistered female murder investigator in Jeddah.) Unfortunately, Kate Reading only gets her wake-up call very late in the story. The rest of the time she reads in a dozy, repetitive rhythm that has nothing to do with the excitement on the page, ending sentence after sentence with a trailing off, as if she's encountered an ellipse instead of a period--let alone a fright, a snarl of anger, or an exclamation! Combine that with at least three egregious editing foul-ups, and it must be said the publishers have done this engaging book no favors. B.G. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0316074276
• ISBN 13: 9780316074278
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400