About a month before her marriage, Nouf, a 16-year-old girl with a rebellious streak from a rich Saudi Arabian family, was missing along with a truck and a camel. The family sought the help of Nayir ash-Shariq, a desert guide and also a good friend of Othman, who was adopted into the family and became one of its many children.

Nayir was to give up searching at the end of a 10-day trip into the desert when the girl’s body was accidentally found by an anonymous group of travelers. A hasty burial was arranged by the family, which seemed to be more interested in a cover-up than in the discovery of whatever secret lay behind the girl’s disappearance and death.

Othman had to hire the secret service of his fiancée Katya Hijazi, a lab technician to conduct a DNA test. He also asked Nayir to go ahead with the investigation of how Nouf ahd disappeared – again in a secretive way.

Nayir and Katya did what they could, Nayir tracking every conceivable track and Katya mostly at the coroner’s office and her lab. Occasionally they met and shared information. And here’s the characteristic feature of the novel: With each visit to a place or a person, Nayir and/or Katya picked up one more clue and came to know a little more about the whole story. The reading, therefore, is like eating a kind of food whose full taste will not be found till the end. The reader thumbs through page after page, hoping against hope that he will be able to know the end soon.

To me, Nouf represents some of the more audacious girls of a younger generation in an absolutely closed society such as Saudi Arabia. As she is from a rich family, she has access to many of the luxuries common in the United States, which has long maintained a good relationship with Saudi Arabia. One such luxury is a jet ski, which she enjoys riding from time to time close to the beaches: her home is on an enclosed island by the Red Sea but connected by a bridge with Jeddah, which is only a couple of miles from the holy city of Mecca. She is the fiancée of a rich man’s son called Qazi, whom she knows little and loves even less: marriages are almost all arranged by the family patriarch, as is the custom in the country.

Constant exposure to western culture fed Nouf’s aspirations so much that she wanted to go and see the United States for herself. She reached an agreement with her fiancé for him to accompany her on a honeymoon visit to New York. Secretly, however, her plan was to meet an American man by the name of Eric there who she came to know in her own city. He had actually given her a key to an apartment where she was to stay. She would never see her husband again and would live in the US. The key was found in Nouf’s pocket when she was murdered in the desert. It became one of the keys to the solution of her mysterious murder.

The fact was that Othman was in secret love with Nouf, and about a month before she embarked on her escape to the US, she became pregnant with his child. But Othman wasn’t happy at all to learn about her plan to go to the US. They had a bitter quarrel, which their sister Abir overheard.

About a year older than Nouf, Abir wanted Qazi not to marry Nouf, but herself. In her desperation, she took advantage of their difference and took a drastic step forward. While Othman hit Nouf on the head and planned to drag her to the desert and leave her there to die, it was Abir who stole a truck and a camel, hitting the camel keeper’s daughter with a pipe in the process.

Then she drove the truck to a zoo, the rendezvous of Othman and Nouf. (It was during one of their rendezvous that Othman got Nouf pregnant.) This time, finding her alone, she knocked her out, pulled her body to the truck, and drove all the way to the desert. Leaving Nouf alone, she didn’t forget to cover her body with a jacket of Othman’s she had stolen from his closet so that when it was found, people would naturally think it was Othman who had killed her.

Nouf never woke up in the desert in spite of a heavy rain. She died there. Somehow her family found that she was illegally pregnant, and so at the funeral, her head faced away from Mecca, the critically intriguing clue to Nayir which launched him on the search for the truth.

During his search, Nayir had many contacts with Katya, Othman’s fiancée. By the end of their investigative work, both had come to realize that Othman was involved in the disappearance of Nouf. And so both found themselves in a highly awkward position: Nayir had always considered Othman a good friend, honest and reliable; and he didn’t know how to confront him now, an attitude shared by Katya. Somehow, Katya told Nayir that her marriage to Othman had been called off.  

The shared investigation between Nayir and Katya increased their mutual understanding. Close to the end of the book, each expressed admiration for the other’s courage and commitment to discovering the truth. For instance, referring to Katya’s courage, Nayir said to Katya, “You amazed me… That’s creative justice.” On the other hand, Katya suggested to him that he could serve as an investigator for the police department because “he was good at detective work.” He declined, though.

As a reader, I would love to see Nayir and Katya become lifelong partners, but the novel doesn’t say anything about it. Nor does it say much about what the family did with Othman or Abir. The only hints are that Nayir would continue to regard Othman as a friend and Abir might be found guilty and “spend some time in jail.”

To read Zoë Ferraris’s^[1] first novel Finding Nouf is to know a little about Saudi Arabia, one of the most closed countries in the world where most men have to appear ayatollah, ^[2] avoiding looking at a woman’s face and all women have to cover their body except for the eyes in public. I have long known that a pious Muslim has to face the direction of Mecca and pray to Allah five times a day, but this was the first time that I learned the term “religious police,” whose job is to roam the streets and see to it that everyone in the street observes religious laws even if one might not be a Muslim. That means a woman might be arrested if she doesn’t wear a scarf with a burqa, ^[3] showing only her eyes or if she exposes her arm or leg or if a man and a woman display their love or affection in public.