Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Stellar.... A searing portrait of the religious and cultural veils that separate Muslim women from the modern world." ---Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Synopsis
A riveting literary mystery that reveals the shrouded world of women in modern-day Saudi Arabia, from prizewinning author Zoe Ferraris.
About the Author
Zoë Ferraris has an M.F.A. from Columbia University and is the author of the novel Finding Nouf, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for First Fiction. She lives in San Francisco. Kate Reading has been a freelance narrator for over twenty years. She received an Audie Award for Bellwether by Connie Willis and for Breasts by Florence Williams; an Audie nomination for The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, recorded with her husband, Michael Kramer; and an Audie nomination for Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell. She has also received numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine, which has named her Narrator of the Year and, for two years running, Best Voice in Science Fiction and Fantasy for her narration of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series. As Jennifer Mendenhall, she has worked as a stage actor in the Washington, D.C., area and has been a member of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company since 1987. Her work onstage has been recognized by the Helen Hayes Awards Society, the Washington Theatre Lobby Awards, and the Carbonell Awards in Florida. She and her husband live in Hyattsville, Maryland, with their two children.