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Night Falls on Damascus - A Novel

By: Frederick Highland

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St. Martin's Press, December 2006

#2533 in Fiction & Literature > Fiction > Historical

Synopsis

A crime of passion brings on a harrowing criminal investigation in a divided land

Set in the exotic and turbulent world of Syria in the 1930s, Night Falls on Damascus tells the story of a French-Syrian police inspector, Nikolai Faroun, caught up in a complex murder investigation of a beautiful and controversial woman from a prominent Damascus family.

Vera Tamiri made enemies for her good works as well as her cosmopolitanism. On one hand was she was a social reformer who had tried to advance the health and welfare of Arab women in a volatile community hemmed in by custom and hostile to social change. However, Vera had a shadowy side: she cultivated a Bohemian pose, gambled recklessly, and was not always wise in her choice of companions---and lovers.

Faroun suspects that she may have fallen victim to a gruesome crime of passion. However, he soon realizes that there is more to this crime than a jealous lover. In a country chafing under foreign rule and divided by sectarian strife, Vera Tamiri made a tempting political target. In a city seething with anger and revolt, Inspector Faroun begins unraveling a conspiracy from Syria's troubled past, a secret that Vera may have uncovered---at the cost of her life.

As the elements of a sinister and elusive crime bubble to the surface, Faroun must be careful not to bring to light secrets of his own---the real reason for his presence in Damascus and a compromising relationship with the beautiful and willful wife of a well-connected French businessman. All games, in the end, must be played against the dark backdrop of a city that has been the center of Middle Eastern intrigue for millennia, the stony ground where Cain slew Abel, where Saladin once ruled, and where Nikolai Faroun must discover the key to the murder of a courageous woman who dared to disturb the ancient order.

A gripping murder mystery, Night Falls on Damascus richly evokes a time and place where the deadly conflict between modernism and tradition in the Middle East first came into play.

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