Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris

Finding Nouf; A Novel by Zoe Ferraris --- 305 pages,

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.

A Woman of Consequence by Anna Dean

A Woman of Consequence: The Investigations of Miss Dido Kent by Anna Dean --- 384 pages

Third volume in the new series of Regency mystery-romances by English author Anna Dean, with a heroine obviously patterned on Jane Austen, and with plots that combine elements of Austen's life with elements drawn from Austen's books.

Dido Kent is an impoverished gentlewoman dependent on her brothers for her support and maintenance, too intelligent for her own comfort, and chafed by her dependency and the assumption that she is at the beck and call of everyone around her. At the age of six and thirty she is aware that her family and friends have consigned her to spinsterhood, but unknown to them, she has received a proposal of marriage from the very personable Mr. William Lomax. Unfortunately, Mr. Lomax, while powerfully attracted by Dido's intelligence and wit, is equally dismayed by her independence is exercising that intelligence, and her penchant for involving herself in situations that "no gentleman wishes to hear from a lady he respects and esteems."

The current situation to which Mr. Lomax objects, concerns Dido's efforts to uncover the truth behind the recent discovery of the remains of a woman, found when an ornamental lake was drained during improvements to the grounds of nearby Maddenstone Abbey. The remains are identified as those of Miss Elinor Fenn, a governess employed at Maddenstone, who walked out of the house fifteen years ago and was never seen again.  

The coroner's jury declares a verdict of suicide; but if this were the case, Dido reasons, why would some unknown person now go to great lengths to remove all remaining traces of the dead woman's history and connections at Maddenstone? And why is no one willing to admit who ordered the draining of the lake? What is causing the apparition of the "Grey Nun" to manifest itself in the Abbey ruins and even to appear in the Great House itself? Why is a gazetted fortune hunter like Captain James Laurence pursuing Penelope Lambe, a pretty but penniless orphan of unknown antecedents, while simultaneously persuading Miss Lucy Crankford to agree to an elopement and clandestine marriage?. Why should Lucy's elder sister Harriet be so adamantly opposed to their brother Silas' attachment to Penelope?

Despite Mr. Lomax's disapproval, Dido knows she cannot stop until she finds the answers to these and other questions, so that justice may be done, the dead laid to rest, and happiness restored to the living. But even in this, Dido finds to her dismay, there may be a vast and seeming unbridgeable gap between a woman's notion of justice and a man's.