City of Veils

City of Veils (#31) by Zoe Ferraris is her second book, a mystery set in present day Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.  Although this book could be read and enjoyed by itself, I would strongly recommend reading Finding Nouf first, as the stories of two of the principal characters are continued in City of Veils. 

It begins with a young woman's badly beaten body washed up on the beach and continues on to an American woman returning to Saudi Arabia to rejoin her husband.  He is late to pick her up, and then promptly disappears.  The connection between these two occurrences is painstakingly put together by the Jeddah police, where Katya, a female lab tech, is pulled in as an investigator.  She calls on Nayir, a desert guide, to aid her in the investigation, based on the work they did together in solving Nouf's murder.

The story by itself is intriguing, but the glimpses of Saudi life and culture make this book endlessly fascinating, and is enough to raise the hackles of any Western woman.  The ending of this book makes it clear that we have not seen the last of Katya and Nayir, and a good thing, too!