Saudi sleuths on the case in ‘City of Veils’

Ferraris knows the country well. She lived in Jeddah with her former husband and his extended family of Saudi-Palestinian Bedouins. She uses her experience to illuminate the attitudes and beliefs that shape life in a closed society in which the strict interpretation of Islamic law prevails, where religious police have the power to arbitrarily arrest anyone for even minor infractions of religious law.

When the mutilated body of a young woman washes up on the beach in Jeddah, the police at first assume that it is another unsolvable murder, probably a housemaid killed by her employer.

But something about this murder strikes Detective Inspector Osama Ibrahim as different. Housemaids don’t usually wear Metallica T-shirts beneath their burqas.

“City of Veils’’ brings back two central characters from Ferraris’s first novel. Katya Hijazi is an independent-minded young woman, a forensic scientist who works in the crime lab at police headquarters. Nayir Sharqui is a Bedouin desert guide. The two work with Osama to discover the young woman’s identity and find her killer.

Skillfully, through her characters, Ferraris shows how the repressive Saudi culture limits the lives of men as well as women. Ambitious Katya must pretend to be married in order to keep her job. Nayir harbors intense romantic feelings for Katya, feelings that unsettle him profoundly. As a devout Muslim he is forbidden to associate with a woman who is not a relative, especially one who works with men and is therefore not a “good’’ woman. Osama prides himself on being modern, even willing to work with a female police officer. But his comparatively liberal attitudes are tested when he discovers that his wife has been secretly taking birth control pills because she would rather pursue her career as a journalist than have more children.