Having recently read Zoe Ferraris' new novel, Kingdom of Strangers, I was eager to go back and read her earlier books. Finding Nouf is Ferraris' first novel, published in 2008, and introduces us to her principal recurring characters: Katya Hijazi, the young woman working in the female forensics lab of the Jedda coroner's office; and Nayir ash-Sharqi, a Palestinian immigrant who works as a desert guide for rich Saudis who want to experience their Bedu heritage.
Katya and Nayir are brought together in an uneasy working alliance by the death of the sixteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Saudi family. Katya is engaged and about to be married to Othman, the adopted son of the Shrawi family; Nayir works for the Shrawi men as their desert guide. When Nouf disappears on the eve of her wedding, Othman asks Nayir to lead the search for her, since the few clues the family have found seem to point to the desert. In the rigidly gender-segregated world of conservative Muslim Saudi Arabia, the family is equally concerned with avoiding scandal as with finding their missing daughter.
Sadly, desert tribesmen find Nouf's body in the desert. Nayir is shocked when the coroner officially rules her death an accidental drowning, caused when she was caught in a flash flood in a wadi and could not escape. The verdict ignores the larger mystery: how did Nouf come to be in the wadi in the first place? He and Katya continue to investigate, convinced that a sheltered young girl could not have run away on her own, and that only someone close to the family had the knowledge and the means to spirit her away.
An intriguing mystery, giving an intimate view of a closed society almost beyond the understanding of outsiders, and of two people forced to rethink many of their ingrained assumptions about men and women.
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