City of Veils

Women in Saudi Arabia are expected to lead quiet lives circumscribed by Islamic 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, detectives are ready to dismiss the case as another unsolvable murder. Only Katya is convinced that the victim can be identified and her killer found. Katya soon discovers that the dead girl was a young filmmaker named Leila whose controversial documentaries earned her many enemies. Was it Leila's connection to an incendiary Koranic scholar or a missing American man that got her killed? In CITY OF VEILS, the award-winning novelist Zo Ferraris combines a thrilling, fast-paced mystery with a rare and intimate look into women's lives in the Middle East.

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. She has an MFA from Columbia University and is the author of two previous novels, Finding Nouf and City of Veils. She lives in San Francisco.