Nayir Sharqi & Katya Hijazi

Zoe Ferraris' debut novel is hailed as a startling, richly textured work of the highest literary merit. Finding Nouf, set in Saudi Arabia, features desert guide Nayir al-Sharqi, who is hired by wealthy friends to find their missing daughter. When the girl turns up dead, apparently drowned in a flash flood in the desert, Nayir suspects that all is not as it seems. And as he looks into her death, he develops an uncomfortable partnership with a female technician at the local coroner's office.

When the body of a brutally beaten woman is found on the beach in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Detective Osama Ibrahim dreads investigating 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. But Katya, one of the few females in the coroner's office, is determined to identify the woman and find her killer. Aided by her friend Nayir, she soon discovers that the victim was a young, controversial filmmaker named Leila. Was it Leila's connection to an incendiary Koranic scholar or a missing American man that got her killed? City of Veils combines a suspenseful and tightly woven mystery with an intimate and nuanced portrait of women's lives in the Middle East.