I found this an intriguing offbeat take on the police procedural murder mystery: a serial killer is targeting women in Saudi Arabia, and the Jeddah murder squad investigating the crimes is stymied by the repressive "virtue" laws that make it almost impossible for male police officers to have any kind of contact with women, not even the dead bodies of the victims.
According to the jacket blurb, the author spent some time in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War, living there with her then husband and his large extended family of Saudi-Palestinian Bedouins. She gives us some fascinating insights into the mostly hidden world of women, and the insidious effect such an orchestrated imbalance of power has, warping even the most mundane details of ordinary life.
Ferraris has written two previous novels, City of Veils and Finding Nouf, and I'll definitely be looking for both of them.
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