The Nayir Sharqi-Katya Hijazi Series

WHAT INSPIRED ME

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When I was 20, I met and fell in love with a man from Saudi Arabia.
We married and had a daughter, and when she was still an infant, we went to Jeddah to visit his family.
I arrived at the airport in some kind of purple witchy cloak—the closest thing San Francisco could offer to an abaaya at the time—I believe it had pentacles and black cats on it. I was completely clueless.
What should have been a two-week stay turned into a months-long odyssey of cultural immersion in the Jeddah of the early 90s. I returned a changed person. Saudi opened the shell of my mind to a new understanding of culture, religion, history, politics, and family.

My husband and I eventually separated, and I spent the next ten years as a single mother constantly explaining my daughter’s background to a mystified American population. Very few people knew  the basics about Saudi, and what they did know was often distorted by stereotype. Every time I’d have one of these conversations, I’d think: someone should write a book about Saudi.
No one wrote the book.
Eventually, I decided to write it myself.
What I wanted was to re-create a world I knew and loved. To give readers a portal into that world that would tear down the negative stereotypes Americans tended to have about Saudi and  replace them with living stories, with the truly complex experience of being inside a living culture, with all of its surprises and contradictions.
I didn’t set out to write a mystery novel. I came to it through my character, Nayir.
He's a devout Muslim man, a Palestinian Jeddawi and desert guide, who has no way of arranging a marriage for himself but who wants marriage and family almost more than anything else. Part of what blocks him is feeling unable to talk to women, and I needed a situation for him that would push him out of his comfort zone. For him, that had to be something morally compelling enough, something that would trump his virtues of modesty and restraint, and murder seemed like a reasonable choice. A friend’s sister is found dead in the desert, and Nayir wants to find out what happened. His determination for justice leads him right into an awkward relationship with Katya Hijazi, a young, open-minded forensic tech who is also keen to solve the crime--and who really can't stand men like Nayir.

The result was Finding Nouf, my 2008 debut novel. It went on to be published in 45 countries and to win numerous accolades and awards. I followed this with two more novels in the series: City of Veils and Kingdom of Strangers. See below for details on each of the books.