This series actually starts with a novella called Soupcon of Poison but Death Below Stairs is listed as the first book. It is confusing. I didn’t read the novella that introduces all the characters and that was fine. You can start right in with Death Below Stairs if you like.
Kat Holloway is a Victorian-age cook. She’s young for the job since she isn’t yet 30 but she is very good. She knows her worth and is willing to fight for her rights as a working woman.
She has just started at a new position as a cook in the household of Lord Rankin. The household consists of Lord and Lady Rankin and Lady Rankin’s unmarried older sister, Cynthia. There are a few rules she is going to have to lay down but overall she thinks it will be a good position until the next morning when she finds her young assistant dead in the larder.
I’m forever going on about hating mysteries where some busy body interferes in the police investigation. I can’t appreciate a mystery book unless there is a legitimate reason for the main character to investigate. The reason here comes in the form of Daniel McAdam. He is some sort of undercover investigator. Kat doesn’t know who he actually works for. (SPOILERS FOR THE NOVELLA – They met in the first novella when Kat was accused of murder. He helped her get free and they are tip toeing around the fact that they are attracted to each other.) He is able to find place himself in the household as a stable helper and together they start investigating what happened.
The series is interesting because it is very much focused on the people in service’s perspective on the aristocracy. Lady Cynthia is a spinster who loves to be outrageous by wearing men’s clothes in public and spending a lot of time with the servants. She gets tapped to help with the investigation also because she can go places and question people who Kat can’t.
It is clear that the author did her research about how Victorian kitchens ran. No matter what is going on with the plot Kat has to get all the meals on the table at the exact time every day. The books describe how it was done every day and what meals were prepared. It is a fascinating look at how these households actually ran.
In the second book Lady Cynthia recruits Kat to help her try to solve a mystery of some missing artwork. One of her friends is being accused by her husband of stealing to cover her gambling debts. Things get complicated when guests get ill and some die after a dinner party that Kat helped cook. They can quickly prove that it wasn’t the food that killed them but who wanted to murder these people?
Kat is enlisted to help out with a neighbor’s household when the master of the house dies suddenly. Suspicion falls on a Chinese man who was seen in the area. Kat has talked to him and is convinced that he was not involved. She vows to prove his innocence as soon as anyone can find him.
I believe this series will be continuing. There are a lot of overarching mysteries that haven’t been solved yet, such as Who exactly is Mr. McAdam and who does he work for? What is going to happen to Lady Cynthia? Is she going to have to marry to appease her relatives or does she have options?
On the day he retires, Inspector Ashwin Chopra inherits two unexpected mysteries.
The first is the case of a drowned boy, whose suspicious death no one seems to want solved. And the second is a baby elephant. As his search for clues takes him across the teeming city of Mumbai, from its grand high rises to its sprawling slums and deep into its murky underworld, Chopra begins to suspect that there may be a great deal more to both his last case and his new ward than he thought. And he soon learns that when the going gets tough, a determined elephant may be exactly what an honest man needs...
I requested the first book of this series from the library as soon as I heard about a baby elephant helping in a detective agency. Really, what more do you need? Rush out and read this.
On his last day at work before his unwanted medical retirement, Inspector Chopra gets a letter saying that he has inherited a very special baby elephant from his uncle. He hasn’t seen his eccentric uncle in years. He has no idea why he had an elephant or even that his uncle had died. He also has no idea why he would think Chopra would want an elephant.
That gets put out of his mind when he gets to work and finds a woman leading a protest in front of the station. Her son died the night before and she knows that the police won’t investigate because they are too poor. He starts to look at the case but doesn’t get very involved because it is his last day and he won’t be able to follow through.
He doesn’t take to retirement well. (Also the set up for the Indian series that starts with The Marriage Bureau for Rich People.) He decides to go see what is going on with the case of the boy that died. He realizes that no one is investigating so he decides to go have a look himself. Soon he is splitting his time between trying to solve this crime and nursing this very sickly, very sad little elephant that was delivered to his apartment complex.
But how does a baby elephant help solve crimes, you ask? Well, even a small elephant is an effective battering ram. Elephants can also find people over long distances. Ganesha is just a baby but his role increases in each book so far.
I’m not usually a fan of mysteries but this one is ok because even though his reason for investigating is mostly boredom and resentment at being made to give up his career, he is a real investigator and not just a busy body. Well, I guess he starts out as a busy body but then formalizes it to be a real private investigator. I’m not a fan of cozy mysteries with busy bodies messing up crime scenes. I’m perfectly ok with elephants trompsing all over crime scenes.
The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown (Baby Ganesh Agency Investigation #2)by Vaseem Khan on May 5, 2016 Pages: 353 Setting: India
For centuries the Koh-i-Noor diamond has set man against man and king against king. Now part of the British Crown Jewels, the priceless gem is a prize that many have killed to possess. So when the Crown Jewels go on display in Mumbai, security is everyone's principal concern. And yet, on the very day Inspector Chopra visits the exhibition, the diamond is stolen from under his nose. The heist was daring and seemingly impossible. The hunt is on for the culprits. But it soon becomes clear that only one man - and his elephant - can possibly crack this case...
I love the covers of these books. They are so cute and colorful. I’m usually indifferent to covers but I love these.
Mild spoiler for the end of the first book but not really – Chopra ends up opening a restaurant for policemen/detective agency office/place for Ganesha to live in the backyard at the end of book 1. The restaurant itself doesn’t play a huge role here but I’m claiming it for Foodies Read anyway because everyone needs to know about baby elephants.
Speaking of Ganesha, he considers himself a full-fledged part of the agency. He has a special truck he rides around Mumbai in so he can go on stakeouts. In this book he gets to go undercover in a circus performance and loves his sparkly costume. He’s also making new friends at the restaurant and gets to help rescue one when he gets in trouble.
Meanwhile, Chopra is hired by an old colleague who was in charge of security for the Crown Jewels. He’s been arrested and knows that he’s going to take the fall for this crime if the real criminals can’t be found.
These books are fun. I’m looking forward to reading more and seeing how this team learns to work together even more.
1881, Sussex. Lady Helena Scott-De Quincy’s marriage to Sir Justin Whitcombe, three years before, gave new purpose to a life almost destroyed by the death of Lady Helena’s first love. After all, shouldn’t the preoccupations of a wife and hostess be sufficient to fulfill any aristocratic female’s dreams? Such a shame their union wasn’t blessed by children . . . but Lady Helena is content with her quiet country life until Sir Justin is found dead in the river overlooked by their grand baroque mansion.
The intrusion of attractive, mysterious French physician Armand Fortier, with his meddling theory of murder, into Lady Helena’s first weeks of mourning is bad enough. But with her initial ineffective efforts at investigation and her attempts to revive her long-abandoned interest in herbalism comes the realization that she may have been mistaken about her own family’s past. Every family has its secrets—but as this absorbing series will reveal, the Scott-De Quincy family has more than most.
Can Lady Helena survive bereavement the second time around? Can she stand up to her six siblings’ assumption of the right to control her new life as a widow? And what role will Fortier—who, as a physician, is a most unsuitable companion for an earl’s daughter—play in her investigations?
I loved Helena. At the beginning of the book she has just been widowed for the second time although she is only in her early 20s. She is the youngest daughter in a large family. Because of that she has always been treated as a child. They even call her “Baby” although her brother is younger than her.
Helena is shocked by the death of her husband and is starting to get angry about the way her family has swooped in assuming that she is a problem that needs to be managed again. She declares that she is not going to be married off again. She is going to manage her own estate. She is not going to be pushed out of her own life any more.
Then her late husband’s doctor tells her that he doesn’t believe his death was accidental but that the other men on the inquiry panel ruled against him. Most of those men are related to her. What are they trying to hide?
There are several plot lines in this book.
How did Helena’s husband actually die?
Helena standing up for herself with her family
A tenant farmer’s death
I enjoyed reading about Helena’s relationships with each of the people in her large family. She’s always accepted the surface version of things but now that she’s starting to dig deeper into her life, things aren’t always as she assumed. Her little brother is overbearing and too enamored of his status as the head of the family but he isn’t always wrong about what she should do with her life. Her mother and father may not have had the idyllic marriage that Helena imagined. There may be more to her free-spirited artist sister than she expects. All these relationships set up storylines that can continue into other books in the series.
The book dives into disability during this time period also. Helena’s mother is in the late stages of dementia. She has a full time nurse but the mental toll on family members and on Helena’s mother is discussed in ways appropriate to the time period. Helena’s brother reads as autistic. At this time, that wasn’t a described condition so he is mostly considered odd and sometimes offputting. But, his wife loves him and understands him and helps him interact with his family and the rest of the world. Helena has a physically disabled nephew who she loves but who is treated as feeble-minded by his parents even though he is not. She helps him learn to stand up for himself as she learns it for herself.
I’m not a fan of books where lay people investigate crimes unless the story sets up a good reason why the authorities can’t be involved. In this case the authorities of the area are all family members who may be involved. The doctor is French and may be a spy. You never know quite who you can trust.
I will definitely read the next book in this series.
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Jane Steen was born in England and, despite having spent more years out of the British Isles than in, still has a British accent according to just about every American she meets.
Her long and undistinguished career has included a three-year stint as the English version of a Belgian aerospace magazine, an interesting interlude as an editor in a very large law firm, and several hectic years in real estate marketing at the height of the property boom. This tendency to switch directions every few years did nothing for her resume but gave her ample opportunity to sharpen her writing skills and develop an entrepreneurial spirit.
Around the edges of her professional occupations and raising children, she stuck her nose in a book at every available opportunity and at one time seemed on course to become the proverbial eternal student. Common sense prevailed, though, and eventually she had the bright idea of putting her passion for books together with her love of business and writing to become a self-published author.
Jane has lived in three countries and is currently to be found in the Chicago suburbs with her long-suffering husband and two adult daughters.
Meet Andorra Pett; with her trusty sidekick, she's taken over a derelict cafe. On a mining station. It just happens to be orbiting Saturn! She's hoping for a fresh start, away from all the drama of her old life. It's a chance to relax and start again in a place where nobody knows anything about her or her past. But the cafe holds a secret, and secrets have a habit of coming out; whether you want them to or not. And being accident prone doesn't help. The more you try to pretend that you know what's going on, the worse it gets. Andorra's plans for peace and quiet get lost amid the revelations and skulduggery and she soon realises that the fate of the whole station lies in her hapless hands. In space, you can still trip over your feet; the question is, will you land upright?
I’m not usually a cozy mystery fan because it always drives me crazy when people don’t report crimes to the police and decide to investigate themselves. I decided to give this one a try though because of the twist on the genre. This cafe owner who is investigating a crime is living on a space station.
Andorra and her friend Cyril moved to a space station near Saturn. It is there to support mining in the rings of Saturn. The previous owner of the cafe left suddenly. When cleaning the cafe to reopen though, they find his body. Not knowing who to trust on the station because they are new, they keep him in the freezer.
The book gets into issues of sexual harassment and infidelity because the previous owner was known for seducing many women on the station and then keeping records that could be used to blackmail them. Anyone could be a suspect. I was reading this book just as all the accusations of sexual harassment in Hollywood were coming to light. It was a jarring juxtaposition to see this plotline at that time. It made it feel very timely and topical.
I liked the world building. Andorra is taken all over the station to see how life on the space station works. It was well thought out and logical. I love that there is a farm.
The book takes place an unspecified time in the future when Mars has been colonized for a long time. Unfortunately, there still is homophobia on the space station. That surprised me because usually I don’t see that in sci-fi I read. It made me uncomfortable because I kept thinking that we should be over that by then.
Overall I did enjoy this story. I would be interested in reading more in this series. Check this one out especially if you enjoy both cozy mysteries and sci-fi.
A native of Brixham in Devon, Richard Dee’s family left Devon when he was in his teens and settled in Kent. Leaving school at 16 he briefly worked in a supermarket, then went to sea and travelled the world in the Merchant Navy, qualifying as a Master Mariner in 1986. Coming ashore to be with his growing family, he used his sea-going knowledge in several jobs, including Marine Insurance Surveyor and Dockmaster at Tilbury, before becoming a Port Control Officer in Sheerness and then at the Thames Barrier in Woolwich. In 1994 he was head-hunted and offered a job as a Thames Estuary Pilot. In 1999 he transferred to the Thames River Pilots, where he regularly took vessels of all sizes through the Thames Barrier and upriver as far as H.M.S. Belfast and through Tower Bridge. In all, he piloted over 3,500 vessels in a 22-year career with the Port of London Authority. Richard was offered part time working in 2010, which allowed him to return to live in Brixham, where he took up writing and blogging. He retired in 2015, when he set up and ran a successful Organic bakery, supplying local shops and cafés. The urge to write eventually overtook the urge to bake but Richard still makes bread for friends and family. Richard is married with three adult children and two grandchildren.
He can be found at www.richarddeescifi.co.uk
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/RichardDeeAuthor
Twitter – https://twitter.com/@RichardDockett1
When an intricate old map is found stuffed into the walls of the bistro in Three Pines, it at first seems no more than a curiosity. But the closer the villagers look, the stranger it becomes.
Given to Armand Gamache as a gift the first day of his new job, the map eventually leads him to shattering secrets. To an old friend and older adversary. It leads the former Chief of Homicide for the Sûreté du Québec to places even he is afraid to go but must.
And there he finds four young cadets in the Sûreté academy, and a dead professor. And, with the body, a copy of the old, odd map.
I had never heard of this detective series until BEA 2016 when Louise Penny was one of the speakers at the adult breakfast. This is the twelfth book in the series. Normally I would never start a series in the middle but I had a copy of the book so I decided to try it.
This seems like a good place for new readers to start. From what I gathered from the text, the detective at the heart of the story had investigated police corruption. After this investigation, a lot of high ranking people were arrested. The detective retired from the police. Now he is taking an interim job as the director of the police academy. He knows that a lot of students are coming out of the school predisposed to brutal conduct. He wants to change the culture of the training.
You don’t need to know much about what happened before to enjoy this book. What you need is explained in the text. The detective lives in a small town that is not on any maps. An old map of his town is found in a wall in a local shop. It has a lot of strange pictures on it. As an exercise, he gives a few cadets copies of the map and asks them to figure out the mystery behind it. Then his major suspect for teaching police misconduct is murdered and a copy of the map is in his nightstand. The detective thinks someone is trying to frame one of the students – a girl whom he admitted to the school after she was previously turned away.
There are several mysteries explored in this book. Who killed the professor? Why did the new director admit this girl to the school? Why isn’t the town of Three Pines on any official maps? Who made the one map it is on?
This book is set in Quebec City and the surrounding countryside. I haven’t read many books set in Quebec. The author lives there and her love for the community and culture comes through.
I’d recommend this book for anyone who like police stories and mysteries. It was interesting enough that I will pick up future books. I probably won’t go backwards because reading this one does tell you what happened in the previous books.
About Louise Penny
She lives with her husband, Michael, and a golden retriever named Trudy, in a small village south of Montreal.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
“A secret grave in the desert is unearthed revealing the mutilated bodies of nineteen women and the shocking truth that a serial killer has been operating undetected in Jeddah for more than a decade. However, lead inspector Ibrahim Zahrani, is distracted by a mystery closer to home. His mistress has suddenly disappeared, but he cannot report her missing, since adultery is punishable by death. With nowhere to turn, Ibrahim brings the case to Katya, one of the few women on the force. Drawn into both investigations, she must be increasingly careful to hide a secret of her own.”
This is the third book in this wonderful mystery series that features a woman trying to advance in the man’s world of Saudi Arabia. Katya is officially a forensics tech. She wants to be a detective but that is not allowed. There is push back now about even allowing women to work in the police department at all. Some people only want women to do things men absolutely can’t like search female suspects and handle female corpses.
Katya has set out to make herself necessary. Now a gravesite with nineteen women has been found and she wants to help with the case. When an expert on serial killers is brought in to help with the case and she turns out to be female, Katya is excited but worried about the hostility this brings up in her male coworkers.
She is also worried about her secret getting out. Only married women are allowed to work for the police. She isn’t married but has been pretending that she is. Now she is actually getting married and her father wants to invite everyone. She is also having concerns about the marriage. Nayir, her fiance who she met in the first book, is much more conservative than she is. She can tell that he is uneasy about her working with men. Will he try to control her once they marry even if he claims that he won’t now?
The author lived in Saudi Arabia and that shows in the small details of her writing. The story seems to have a strong sense of place in Jeddah. There are many issues brought up in this book.
The mistreatment of Asian women
Many Asian women are brought to Saudi Arabia to work as maids. Abuse is rampant. The women are charged fees to get jobs. They can’t always pay back the fees and end up in virtual slavery. Some are repeatedly raped. The mystery in this book focuses on the difficulty of solving crimes involving these women because so many run away from the abuse and are not reported missing.
Morality as a weapon
Enforcement of morality is a theme in several parts of this book. The investigation is dragging on because the head coroner won’t let men handle the bodies of the murdered women to preserve their modesty in death. But, there aren’t enough women to process the bodies quickly because they don’t like to hire women.
Old case files have the pictures of female victims removed because of modesty making it hard to compare them to new cases.
A missing woman can’t be reported missing because the only person who knows that she is gone is her married lover. If it is found out that they were together, she will be charged with prostitution and he will be charged with adultery.
Even if you aren’t a big mystery fan, I’d recommend this series for the details of life in modern day Saudi Arabia.
About Zoe Ferraris
Zoë Ferraris moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. She lived in a conservative Muslim community with her then-husband and his family, a group of Saudi-Palestinians.
In 2006, she completed her MFA in Fiction at Columbia University.
She currently lives in San Francisco.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
“Two nights ago, a young woman brought her husband into the emergency room of the Sriphat Hospital in Thailand, where he passed away. A guard thinks she remembers her coming in before, but with a different husband – one who also died. Ladarat Patalung, for one, would have been happier without a serial murderer-if there is one — loose in her hospital. Then again, she never expected to be a detective in the first place. And now, Ladarat has no choice but to investigate…”
Ladarat Patalung is a nurse ethicist at a hospital in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand. When a police detective asks for her help in searching records to see if this woman has brought other men to the hospital, she finds herself falling in love with the idea of being a detective.
Her life has been stagnant. She was widowed twelve years ago after just a few years of marriage. Her life revolves around her job and her cat. Now she is being proactive and getting involved in the lives of people around her.
It becomes obvious very quickly that this book is written by a Western man for an intended audience who is not familiar with Thai culture. Terms that would be easily recognized by a Thai audience are painstakingly defined. The author has spent a lot of time in Thailand and has done a lot of research but it does distance the reader from the story. He works all this detail in by having Ladarat contemplate everything around her very deeply. It makes her come off as a very cerebral and unemotional character who is always partially removed from the people and circumstances around her.
I love the premise of the main mystery. Why does a woman bring in a second dead husband a few months after her last one died? That’s what made me interested in the book. I also haven’t read many books set in Thailand. However, there are several other plots in this book and sometimes that mystery gets forgotten for a while. There is the story of an American man who is injured while on his honeymoon. This serves to set up discussions on American versus Thai responses to health care and crises. There is also a mystery man hanging out in the waiting room who never speaks to anyone. Ladarat is charged with getting rid of him because there is an inspection of her hospital in a few days and the administration doesn’t want homeless people hanging around.
I did learn about Thai culture and attitudes while reading this book. I’d recommend this for people who like deliberately paced stories with plenty of slice of life details about places that they aren’t familiar with. Another book that does this well is The Marriage Bureau for Rich People.
East Long Beach. The LAPD is barely keeping up with the neighborhood's high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, lost children unrecovered. But someone from the neighborhood has taken it upon himself to help solve the cases the police can't or won't touch. They call him IQ. He's a loner and a high school dropout, his unassuming nature disguising a relentless determination and a fierce intelligence. He charges his clients whatever they can afford, which might be a set of tires or a homemade casserole. To get by, he's forced to take on clients that can pay. This time, it's a rap mogul whose life is in danger. As Isaiah investigates, he encounters a vengeful ex-wife, a crew of notorious cutthroats, a monstrous attack dog, and a hit man who even other hit men say is a lunatic. The deeper Isaiah digs, the more far reaching and dangerous the case becomes.
Isaiah Quintabe’s whole world fell apart when his brother Marcus died leaving teenaged Isaiah on his own. In order to make his rent he gets a local drug dealer and petty criminal named Dodson as a room mate. It changes both of their lives.
Now years later Dodson has a case that he thinks Isaiah would be interested in. It has a huge paycheck attached and Dodson has decided to help out to get his cut – whether Isaiah wants him around or not.
This book reminded me a lot of a Carl Hiaasen novel. The mystery is convoluted. The characters are quirky and unexpected. The book is laugh out loud funny at times.
IQ is a loner who is brilliant and who has trained himself to be observant and make deductions like Sherlock Holmes
Dodson is a drug dealer who wants to move on to crimes with a better class of criminals
Deronda is a woman from IQ and Dodson’s past who is looking to be become famous any way possible
Cal is a depressed rap superstar who has a greedy entourage
Add in a hit man with an obsession with breeding the perfect attack dogs
The story is told through dual time lines.
Present Day
Cal is too depressed to leave his house and go into the studio to record his contractually obligated next album. Anything he writes is way too depressing to record anyway. He is attacked in his house by a gigantic dog. He only gets away by falling in the pool and making so much noise that the neighbor calls the police. A man comes out of the woods to get the dog and lets Cal live. Isaiah takes the case.
In the Past
Dodson has just moved in with a grieving Isaiah. He realizes that he has a genius as a room mate and that genius is in need of money. He decides to put Isaiah’s brain to use to think up better criminal activities.
It is interesting to see what happens in the past to make Isaiah the detective that he is today. This is supposed to be the start of a series and I can’t wait to see what Isaiah gets up to next.
My only quibble is that at one point they rob a pet store and take feline epilepsy test strips. I wish they would have gotten me some. Those would be handy since nothing like that actually exists. The author probably meant feline diabetes test strips. Sorry, that’s my veterinarian side coming out.
First come first served and if you want to throw in a few dollars for shipping that would be great but not required.
In early 20th century British East Africa, there are rules for the British and different ones for the Africans. Vera McIntosh, the daughter of Scottish missionaries, doesn't feel she belongs to either group; having grown up in Africa, she is not interested in being the well-bred Scottish woman her mother would like her to be. More than anything she dreams of seeing again the handsome police officer she's danced with. But more grisly circumstances bring Justin Tolliver to her family's home.
Vera’s uncle is the doctor at the Scottish mission where Vera lives. His body is found with a Masaai spear in his back. The colonial government wants a suspect in custody rapidly and seizes upon a local witch doctor who has been highly critical of the white doctor. The African people know that he would never have done this in this manner. A cursory investigation points at several English suspects but this is not acceptable to the local authorities.
Vera, Justin Tolliver an English policeman, and Kwai Libazo, a half Masaai/half Kikuyu policeman are left to investigate on their own if they want to get the real killer before an innocent man is executed.
This book captures an era where British landowners were running roughshod over the local tribes in Kenya. There were African police employed by the British but they were not allowed to be seen having any authority over Europeans. They weren’t allowed to speak in meetings about cases. Police investigations did not bother to interview Kikuyu people who may have information about crimes. The goal was to show that this was a safe place for British people and to keep Africans subjugated.
Vera was born in Africa to Scottish parents. She was raised by her Kikuyu “second mother”. She understands the unfairness of British rule and the resentments of the African people but can’t do anything about it because of her sheltered status as an unmarried European woman.
Justin has come to love Africa. He is the second son of an Earl but his local status fell sharply when he joined the police. Now he is ostracized from society in Nairobi.
Kwai wants to learn about how the British investigate crimes but is seen as a traitor because he works for the occupiers. He has never fit in anywhere because of being half Masaai. He has never been fully accepted by either tribe.
There is a casual racism throughout this book that was probably typical of the time. Even characters who are supposed to be enlightened are dismissive of most Africans. Attempts are made to include the Kikuyu point of view but I’m not sure how effective it is. They seem a bit too passive for everything that is happening to them. This may be because we are only hearing the stories of Africans who have chosen to work closely with the British.
Women in Saudi Arabia are expected to lead quiet lives circumscribed by Islamic law and tradition. But Katya, one of the few women in the medical examiner's office, is determined to make her work mean something.
When the body of a brutally beaten woman is found on the beach in Jeddah, the city's detectives are ready to dismiss the case as another unsolvable murder-chillingly common in a city where the veils of conservative Islam keep women as anonymous in life as the victim is in death. If this is another housemaid killed by her employer, finding the culprit will be all but impossible.
An American woman living in Saudi Arabia for a year with her husband isn’t met at the airport when she returns from a month in the U.S. After her husband finally arrives to get her out of the Unclaimed Women* room, he takes her home and runs out to get dinner. He puts the food on the table and then disappears.
The body of a woman is found on the beach. She is not easily identified because her face and hands have been burned beyond recognition.
Katya Hijazi is a laboratory technician in the forensic lab in Jeddah. She would like to do more but her opportunities are limited. Her break comes when one of the few female police officers who goes on murder investigations is fired because she lied about being married. Katya is lying too. Unmarried women aren’t allowed to work for the police in Saudi Arabia.
Nayir Sharqi is a desert guide with nothing to do during the hottest time of the year when no one wants to go to the desert. It has been eight months since he last talked to Katya, who he met while working with the investigation in Finding Nouf. He was considering marriage when she suddenly stopped communicating with him. Now his uncle wants him to ask her about a friend of his who died. This opens up lines of communication again. When Katya finds out that the dead girl was involved in making documentaries about the origins of the Qu’ran, she enlists Nayir to read through the documents she’s found because of his knowledge of the scriptures. What he reads shakes the underpinnings of his faith – as does his involvement with Katya and a police officer who has his own code of justice that uses logic and mercy but doesn’t always conform with the letter of the law.
This is the second book in the series set in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. When I think of Saudi Arabia, I don’t often think of the beach. Jeddah is a coastal town and the water plays as much of a part in the lives of the people there as the desert.
This is a very nuanced look at life in Saudi Arabia and the women who live in virtual seclusion there. The author is a white woman who lived in Saudi Arabia with her husband’s family. That informs her description of Miriam, the American woman who has been left stranded when her husband disappears. She also has small insights into life in Saudi Arabia. How do men who have to pick up women to drive them home from work pick out the right person from a group of burka-clad women? Look at the purse and then hope she recognizes you.
She writes compassionately about men struggling to adapt to a world where women are being granted rights that they think conflicts with their faith. She explains the frustrations of the women who want to do more with their lives than be sheltered.
She explains the complications of a murder investigation in a world where men can deny police interviews with female relatives. How do you recreate the life of a victim who has lived her life mostly hidden?
This is a great series and I’m looking forward to reading the last book soon.
*Seriously, Unclaimed Women? Like baggage? That’s just rude. Women aren’t allowed to enter the country without a man to be in charge of them.
About Zoe Ferraris
Zoë Ferraris moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. She lived in a conservative Muslim community with her then-husband and his family, a group of Saudi-Palestinians.
In 2006, she completed her MFA in Fiction at Columbia University.
Fast-paced and utterly transporting, "Finding Nouf" is a riveting literary mystery and an unprecedented window into the lives of men and women in Saudi Arabia.
When sixteen-year-old Nouf goes missing, her prominent family calls on Nayir al-Sharqi, a pious desert guide, to lead the search party. Ten days later, just as Nayir is about to give up in frustration, her body is discovered by anonymous desert travelers. But when the coroner's office determines that Nouf died not of dehydration but from drowning, and her family seems suspiciously uninterested in getting at the truth, Nayir takes it upon himself to find out what really happened.
When a 16 year old girl from a wealthy Saudi family goes missing along with a truck and her camel, her family assumes that she ran into the desert. They hire their desert guide Nayir Sharqi to lead the search team. When she is found, the official story of her death and recovery don’t make sense to him. Then a family member asks him to investigate to find out what really happened.
The mystery of what happened to Nouf wasn’t the point of this book for me. Nayir is a very devout Palestinian man living in Saudi Arabia. He was raised by his unmarried uncle. He has almost no contact with women at all. He doesn’t understand them and this society doesn’t allow him to meet them. He starts to realize the depth of his ignorance when trying to understand the motivation of Nouf. He is also uncomfortable to be working with Katya, a woman in the pathology lab and the fiance of his contact in the Shrawi family.
I found the explanations of the gender conflict in Saudi Arabia to be the most interesting parts of the book.
Nayir is talking to Muhammad, Nouf’s paid escort for when she wanted to leave the family compound without one of her brothers. He introduced his wife, Hend.
“Nayir sipped his tea and marveled at the casual way that Muhammad had spoken of his wife. There had been no need to explain who she was, and telling Nayir her name was something else entirely. It put Muhammad squarely in the category of young infidel wannabe. Gone were the days of calling one’s wife “the mother of Muhammad Junior”; today women had first names, last names, jobs and whatnot. He wondered how many men had known Nouf’s name.”
Later there is this sign at the zoo.
CHILDREN MAY BE ACCOMPANIED BY EITHER THEIR MOTHER OR FATHER BUT NOT BOTH PARENTS. BOYS OVER THE AGE OF 10 ARE CONSIDERED ADULTS.
Even the women have been conditioned to think this is normal. In this passage Katya is thinking about her fiance and his attitude towards her.
“With dismay, she came upon a painful truth: that a modern, enlightened man like Othman, the sort of man who could actually meet a woman in public and not think she was a whore, might not have enough within him to sustain a passionate relationship.”
I was reading this book on vacation at the pool when a Muslim family came in. The mother and teenage daughter were wearing hijabs and long sleeved, long pant bathing suits. The adult male was wearing swimming trunks and showing off his tattoos. The double standard was jarring especially while reading about so many examples of women being treated as lesser beings in this book. If women choose to dress modestly because they believe it is part of the tenets of their religion, fine. But if they are told that they have to because they are responsible for hiding themselves to protect men from having to control their thoughts, then that is not ok.
While being forced to work with and consider the lives of women over the course of the investigation, Nayir starts to reconsider his ideas of proper etiquette. There are two more books in the series and I am interested in reading them to see how this develops.
About Zoe Ferraris
Zoë Ferraris moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. She lived in a conservative Muslim community with her then-husband and his family, a group of Saudi-Palestinians.
In 2006, she completed her MFA in Fiction at Columbia University.
I don’t read a lot of mysteries, especially series of mysteries. This author is one I read routinely though. I appreciate that there isn’t a repeating character that always finds a dead body and takes it on himself to investigate. If that happens over and over to a person, I start thinking they must be a serial killer. This author writes characters that have a legitimate cause for investigating the crime at hand. They aren’t just nosy busy bodies.
In Damage, Jeff Hinckley is an investigator for the British Horseracing Authority. A murder is committed by a suspect he’s trailing through a crowd at an event. The murderer was banned from racing because his horses were drugged but he claimed he didn’t do it. Now other trainers are receiving threats to pay money or their horses will be drugged. Maybe the investigation into the first trainer was flawed?
When every horse at an event tests positive for the same drug, the BHA receives a threat. Pay 5 million pounds or it will happen again. Hinckley is assigned to find out what is going on. The sabotage starts escalating from drugged horses to sick people to accidents on course.
The interesting part of the book for me was figuring out how these things were happening. All do you drug all the horses at an event, for example? The main character is good at disguises and going undercover.
There are some side stories in here that distract a bit from the main plot. The resolution of the plot seems abrupt and slightly anticlimactic. I felt sort of, “Well, that’s that then” at the end but it was interesting and kept me reading up to that point.
