City of Veils (Katya Hijazi, Book 2) - Softcover

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.

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