Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris

Nouf ash-Shrawi is 16 and soon to be married. Child of a big and rich family that lives on their own island off the coast of Jeddah. A family pick-up is missing and so is one of the family’s camels. Nouf appears to have run off into the desert. The police are looking, but the desperate family has hired lots of people to look for her, including Nayir ahs-Sharqi, a desert guide/friend of one of her brothers, Othman. 

The search goes on for a couple weeks and hope fades with each passing day. Some Bedouins find her body, alert the search party, and her corpse is hustled to the medical examiner’s office for a quick autopsy so she can be buried that day, per their custom.

Nayir accompanies the body so that he can then take her remains to the family. The examiner does a cursory exam. An autopsy tech, Katya Hijazi, tells Nayir that no, she had not been molested. Cause of death? Drowning. In the desert? But they both wonder why the family wants the investigation and post-mortem wrapped up quietly and quickly.

Nayir and Katya form an uneasy alliance. Not just because they are both good (but not ‘devout’) Muslims and unmarried men/women just do not interact, but because Katya is engaged to Nayir's friend and Nouf's brother - Othman. The two conduct a delicate waltz around their commitment to Islam vs. their growing obsession for justice for Nouf.

Both being amateur investigators, the misread clues and take wrong turns in the investigation, but each misstep leads to an important clue the takes them closer to an answer. All the while being very delicate in their developing affection for each other that their circumstances won’t allow.

This is #1 in the 3 part series of police procedurals set in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia by Ferraris. It was a LA Time award winner for first mystery and deservedly so. Ferraris deftly takes we infidels behind the veiled curtain that Islam has surrounded itself to see a cultural existence that we can only imagine . . . and assuming her description is far more accurate than what we perceive . . . our understanding is probably 95% wrong.

One part police procedural – one part cultural unveiling – entirely entertaining. I’m reading part 2 now. The last time I slammed though an author’s trilogy this quickly was the Moscow secret police trilogy by Tom Rob Smith.  Give this series a chance. It's not just entertaining, it's also eye-opening.

ECD