Customer Reviews

City of Veils: A Novel

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I ordered this book kind of on impulse. I love Scandinavian mysteries, but am less enamored of more conventional ones. City of Veils, however, set in Saudi Arabia and dealing with women's issues, promised to be interesting at least, particularly because the cover copy promised insights into the lives of women in a culture Westerners like me know little about.

As it happened, the book was way more than merely interesting. It was gripping--one of those books that caused me to blow off plans in order to keep reading. There were times when I stayed up way too late because I couldn't put it down. The main characters are three-dimensional, and the world they inhabit is well-drawn--a much-needed counterbalance to the paranoid universe Americans currently inhabit with respect to Muslims. The author, Zoe Ferraris, lived in Saudi Arabia and clearly knows whereof she writes.

The plot is fast-paced but never rushed, and mostly believable, though there were a few coincidences that seemed a bit of a stretch (at least one of which would cause me to give away some of the plot if I were to reveal it here). And naturally, the rescue of the protagonists in their moment of greatest need came just in the nick of time. None were enough for me to take away a star, however. Ferraris is an accomplished writer with a true understanding of Saudi culture and human nature and has produced a fascinating, entertaining read.

Five stars, unequivocally.

When the badly beaten and burned body of a young woman washes up on shore near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Inspector Osama Ibrahim doesn't hold out much hope for finding her killer. Aided by Katya, an ambitious lab tech, however, he discovers the identity of the victim and begins investigating her life and death. Katya is a bright young woman who follows oblique clues and assists Osama in the field, as well as enlisting the help of an old friend, Nayir. She had not spoken to Nayir in some time, but both find that the feelings they have for one another are still very much alive. Their romance becomes more complicated, though, when they meet a lonely American woman in need of help when her husband goes missing.

I acquired this book because I was interested in seeing how a murder mystery would unfold in Saudi Arabian culture, and was greatly rewarded. Not only is the mystery here intriguing, but the culture in which the story unfolds is riveting reading, as well. Almost everyone has heard horror stories of how women are treated in Saudi Arabia, but this novel goes beyond stereotypes and focuses on realistic characters. We see Saudi culture from several angles: the devout Muslim man determined to follow religious law while wrestling with his feelings for a woman, a more progressive man who seems determined to ignore old-fashioned practices, an American man bewitched by the place, a young Saudi woman comfortable in her role while still feeling its restrictions, and a lonely American woman attempting to find her way in an unfamiliar land. I found these insights fascinating, and appreciated the author's ability to show us a slice of a very different culture without passing judgments on it.

I recommend this book to anyone who likes a good, gripping mystery with a rich back story, and can't wait to read other books by this author.

I loved the beginning of this novel and was very taken by the premise, the setting, and the atmosphere. The dilemma of a Western woman and of women in general in a restrictive, misogynistic-seeming Arab culture was both fascinating and frightening to me. The writing was also evocative and compelling, much more skillfully crafted than most mystery thrillers. Unfortunately, as I kept reading, I grew less involved in the story because it was beginning to seem a less plausible and reliable depiction. Some parts actually confused me or were unclear, where as others became too repetitive and almost didactic, continually mentioning the veils women characters had to wear and their repressed position in society. Although I was sympathetic to the point of view and appalled by many of the social injustices, something about the artistic rendering did not ring entirely true, and I felt I was getting a somewhat skewed or biased perspective instead of a more fully rounded and richly nuanced one. The central romantic relationship between the two detective characters never entirely resonated with me, and the narrative drive of the mystery began to lag. It was still a better than average read but not the consistently insightful portrait of another culture or the can't put-it-down suspense novel I hoped it would be.

This book is very well written.

I was captivated by the characters almost immediately and read the entire book in 24 hours because I literally couldn't put it down. The characters are amazingly complex and well developed. I was drawn into their story almost immediately.

The plot moves along at a fast pace and it is a very interesting premise. The author has written a basic murder mystery but sets it in Saudi Arabia. This book is both a good read and a cultural education all in one. I thought it was fascinating.

I liked that the author used the different characters and their unique perspectives to explore and explain Muslim Belief and Culture, at least as it exists in Saudi Arabia. She includes characters who are devout Muslims, characters who are more relaxed in their belief, characters who don't really practice their faith at all, and even characters who are anti-Muslim. It made for a very educational and thought provoking read.

Over all I thought this was a great book.

There were a couple of negatives for me however.

This book seems to support the idea that Islam is detrimental to women; that at the very core it is abusive to women. This is definitely not a "pro-Islam" book. It would have been more balanced to hear from a female Muslim character who DID love and practice her faith devoutly. There are many Muslim women who do love their faith and who do not feel that their faith diminishes or oppresses them [whether we agree with them or not]. I thought the author's bias came through very clearly on this issue [that Islam is anti-woman]. I can understand the criticism she has taken from Muslim readers [in looking at reviews on her first book].

The only other minor thing I would note about the book is that for the first 50 pages or so I was a bit confused about the characters. There are several main "voices" in the book, and it took me about 50 pages to sort them all out. But it was well worth the effort for a very entertaining read. [Part of that may have been because I had not read her first novel prior to reading this one - the characters may have been more thoroughly introduced in the first book].

For readers who may be concerned about these issues, I will note that there was brutal violence against women in the book; as well as sex scenes and occasional use of the "F" word.

This was a great mystery novel set in a unique setting [for most Western readers]. I liked it well enough that I went back and bought the author's first novel "Finding Nouf" and I look forward to reading that.

UPDATE JULY 18: I received "Finding Nouf" and read it in 2 days. It is an outstanding book. I wanted to add to this review - IF I had read "Finding Nouf" first, I would not have been confused about the characters in the beginning of "City of Veils" - most of the characters are thoroughly and beautifully introduced in "Finding Nouf". I highly recommend reading "Finding Nouf" first and then "City of Veils". I liked "Finding Nouf" better, actually, and it lacked the pervasive anti-Muslim sentiment that I felt throughout "City of Veils". "City of Veils" is much harsher in its judgment of Islam and those who believe it.

So, to sum up, both books are fantastic over all and well worth reading. Thank you Ms. Ferraris.

Zoe Ferraris's second novel, City of Veils, is a follow-up to her debut, Finding Nouf. A literary mystery set in Saudi Arabia, City of Veils is a different kind of suspense thriller. Among the cloaked town, hidden in the desert or behind a burqa, a killer has taken the life of a woman whose body washes onto the beach. Badly burned, beaten, and stabbed, the investigation into her murder involves more than one detective and citizen of Jeddah. Pushing the boundaries of expectations, both religious and legal, Ferraris's characters delve into the mystery of the woman's death with the hopes of bringing her killer to justice.

My favorite thing about this novel was the fact that it was set in Saudi Arabia. An unlikely place to serve as the backdrop for a thriller, my interest in Ferraris was piqued and I looked on her website and checked out some interviews to discover she once lived in the town of Jeddah, and has first-hand experience of the area and the people who live there. It gave her writing an authentic voice, and though it's hard for me to imagine the rigid expectations women face in Saudi Arabia, I know from her background that what Ferraris writes under the guise of a fiction thriller, can and does occur outside the cover of a book.

Aside from the location and the language placing this novel in a foreign setting, Ferraris's writing was natural and her plot was intriguing. I didn't know going into it that this was a follow-up novel, but I didn't feel disconnected, or as though I missed too much of the background story. Some of the past events were explained, so I understood why Nayir and Katya had a tortured history.

I enjoyed the murder-mystery and suspense value in City of Veils. It's not your everyday sleuth adventure when a burning, grinding, sand-storm is rushing toward you. It's not a generic persons-go-missing and turn up okay later. People die and the villains are punished, and through it all, Ferraris's writing carries on from one perspective to the next, making each character determined and endearing.

There have been many literary mysteries written and many books about the plight of women in repressive Saudi Arabia, but I have never read an author who is able to so seamlessly weave these threads together to create a potboiler thriller that sizzles with knowledge.

Set in Jeddah - seemingly one of the more liberal cities of Saudi Arabia - the core of the story focuses on a burqa-clad and tortured body of a young woman on a beach. Three stories are interwoven: a whodunit story of how she got there and who perpetrated such violence on her...the story of forensic scientist Katya and her would-be suitor Nayir, a Bedouin guide, who is crippled emotionally by the yokes of his religion...and a vanished American expat Eric Walker, whose wife Miriam finds herself bereft in an alien culture where women truly have no face.

What makes City of Veils stand out is its nuanced and highly intimate portrayal of a woman's life in a repressive and paranoid country...where women's faces are shielded, voices are silenced, and lifestyles are infantilized. Ms. Ferraris - who herself moved to Saudi Arabia with her now ex-husband and his extended family of Saudi-Palestinian Bedouins - has a voice that rings with authority. Some of it is unwittingly humorous: the husband Eric, for example, has a name that translates to a part of the male anatomy, and therefore is renamed Abdullah while at work. But most of it is frustrating and heartbreaking. We read, for example, about women's mini-rebellions, as they hide Bluetooth devices inside their burquas, which send the message, "Do you want to see my face?" Or the quagmire of lingerie stories: women cannot interact with the male proprietors of the stores; therefore, the government allowed women to work in these lingerie shops. Only one problem: the religious police are convinced women should be tending to their homes and babies, not shopping.

Ferraris shows that this repression is not just a woman's problem; it's a man's as well. Osama Ibrahim - the fair and liberal police investigator - believes his marriage is a strong one until he discovers his wife has been surreptitiously taking birth control pills. And Nayir, who was featured in Finding Nouf, is numbed down by the love he feels for Katya, all the while knowing she may not be such a "good Muslim woman", and how can he possibly marry an infidel? Being in a car with a woman who is not his wife is excruciating for him: "This was the worst kind of weakness because there was nothing he could do about it...short of kicking her out of the car."

On one level, City of Veils has all the dimensions of a first-rate crime story; its eventual denouement in the scorching and unforgiving desert would make a stunning and crowd-pleasing movie. Yet on a deeper level, the book shines its laser-eye on woman who must be resourceful to even feel human while simmering inside, and the men who are raised to fear them and place a lid on their own human desires and compassion. City of Veils does what sometimes seems to be impossible - lifts the cultural veils off and looks gender segregation right in the eye.

This thriller starts off with a bang. A fisherman finds a dead woman on the beach who has been tortured and has a broken neck. There is no way to know how long she's been lying there. She is in a state of partial undress which is sinful in Saudi Arabia, even in a modern city such as Jeddah. As the search for her killer begins, the reader is brought into the Saudi culture and we learn about the mores of the Muslim country - veils, burqas, religious police, single women pretending to be married so as to be hired for jobs - a place where the will and desires of men prevail.

The murdered woman is named Leila and she was an anomaly for women in her culture. She was engaged in doing video freelance work for a newspaper but her heart and soul were into her video project about the underside of Saudi culture - prostitution, transvestites, "summer wives", pornography. She was also working with a controversial Koranic scholar. She had courage and also the desire to make money in a culture that made this very difficult for her. Once married and shortly thereafter divorced, she was living with her brother at the time of her death. They fought vigorously about her activities, time away from the home, and the money she needed to pursue her work.

Investigating the crime is the Jeddah police department. Katya is a single woman who secured a job in the pathologist's office by lying and saying that she was married. She has a good reputation, having been instrumental in solving a previous crime. She and her male friend Nayir, a trip leader to remote destinations, worked closely to solve a previous crime and are working together again on this murder investigation. There is an undercurrent of strong feelings in their relationship which is complicated by past issues, Nayir's strict religious beliefs, and their tentativeness with one another.

Also working on this crime is Detective Osama Ibrahim, a lead investigator who thought he had an equal and open relationship with his wife who is a writer. One day he finds out that she has been keeping important secrets from him and his world goes up in smoke. As far as the murder goes, the murders of many women go unsolved. Just as they are covered by day with veils and burqas, women's disappearances are often never reported or discovered.

The novel is excellent at showing the "implications of cross-cultural differences so vast as to be unfathomable." Into the mixture of those involved with the crime are an American woman named Miriam and her missing husband, Eric, ex-pats living on their own compounds, and people who come to Syria for business but never truly mingle in the culture.

The novel is very well-written and a good page-turner. Some of the cross-cultural issues are difficult to understand because they are so different from the ways of life in the United States. Zoe Ferraris knows how to write a good thriller and I look forward to her future work.

At one level this is a classic mystery story: a woman is found on the beach, her face and hands burned and the first thing police must do to find her murderer is discover who she was. Except how do you find out who a woman was in a city, Jeddah, where women have no faces? And so this story becomes, page by page, something far more than a murder mystery. It is the story of the liberal-thinking police investigator whose marriage suffers a crisis when he discovers that his wife has been taking birth control pills and that she does not want more children; it is the story of the Bedouin guide who does not know if he should love the modern-thinking Katya; it is the story of Miriam, the American in Jeddah, who cannot go out to look for her husband when he disappears. But most of all it is a story of Jeddah as seen through women's eyes. Here we see what women think of summer marriages (a sanctioned practice where a man marries a woman for a summer when he goes away on business); what women think of second wives and restrictions their men place on them; the little subterfuges a woman must practice in order simply to work or (in one memorable scene in the novel) to cross the street; what, finally, women think of the hijab.

At the same time though, the author's love for the desert kingdom is equally unmistakable. She uses almost any excuse to describe the desert, the sand-dunes, how light and sound travel there. The jungle valley receives a cursory couple of sentences (the verdant green of the forest "always felt like a gateway one had to pass through to reach the true goal: the wide, barren, unforgiving Empty Quarter") but descriptions of the desert abound not only when the characters are actually there but when they are faced with important decisions.

And so when this murder mystery which holds all the plots and sub-plots in this story together is resolved you get the feeling that not everything is solved. For the men and women for whom we have learned to care through the pages in this novel are still wearing their veils. Oh, they may have been a bit torn, a bit frayed at the edges--but they are still forced to hide their humanity.

The book does not preach but it does make for thoughtful reading. I highly recommend it.

I found out about this book via the NextReads program at my local library. I saw that it was getting glowing reviews so I went for it. I didn't know it was the second book of a series and, honestly, it didn't make that much of a difference. This is a stand alone novel. You don't necessarily have to read Finding Nouf to follow the storyline.

I enjoyed the setting and learning about Saudi Arabian culture as well as the steady tension that built up throughout the first three quarters of the story. I didn't want to stop reading until Osama, Katya & Nayir solved the mystery. What caused it to lose some of the momentum for me was the ongoing relational conflict between the main characters. I understand the cultural and religious restrictions but it got seriously tiring after awhile. I found the vast majority of the male antagonists to be weakly developed stereotypes and was somewhat disappointed by how neatly and unrealistically everything was tidied up at the end.

Frankly, Ferraris is no Larsson and City of Veils is no Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. That being said, I was entertained. While I probably wouldn't go so far as to read any more of this series, I certainly wouldn't recommend that you didn't.

City of Veils is, on the one hand, a police procedural set in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The mystery that drives the novel concerns the brutal murder and post-mortem disfiguration of a young woman filmmaker and the related disappearance of her American lover? husband? friend?, Eric Walker. But while there is a conventional enough detective on the case, Osama Ibrahim, the investigation is aided by Walker's American wife, Miriam, by Katya, a rare female in the coroner's office, and by her friend, Nayir, a Bedouin desert guide. Ms Ferraris -- who was herself married to a Saudi and lived the veiled and secluded life of an Arab wife -- uses her characters and the story to reveal how strict gender segregation and harsh rules limiting interaction between the sexes impacts the Saudi people. Osama imagines himself a modern man, but struggles to deal with his wife's desire for a career over a large family. Miriam is afraid of losing her husband to the allure of Arab life, but hates being trapped behind a burqa. Katya has to pretend to be married just to be eligible for her job. And Nayir is traditional enough to be morally tortured when he has time alone with Katya, but also needs to find a wife somehow and realizes he want Katya to be that woman.

Ms Ferraris does an admirable job of showing us how the fundamentalist regulation of Arab life affects the characters' lives, without bludgeoning over the head with an anti-Muslim message. Interestingly, given that her marriage was not a happy one, she is just as sympathetic to the men of Saudi Arabia as the women. We cannot, of course, know how accurately she captures the popular mood of that closed society, but if she has at all, then it is hard to see how the Sa'uds can long defend their traditions against the pressures of modernity and the desire of the young, in particular, to interact more freely with the opposite sex. These political/cultural themes make the novel fascinating.

The author also uses her setting to one further good effect. Typically at the end of a perfectly good murder mystery you get some melodramatic denouement tacked on, the corny chase scene and/or confrontation with the killer, who starts monologuing (which The Incredibles pokes fun at). The dramatic ending to this book--though there is some further exposition afterward--is genuinely exciting and unique. It's the icing on a very tasty cake.