Hooves of Fez: A Moroccan Gothic Mystery

Others should never have been unlocked at all.At sixty-seven, Dr. Idriss El-Sebti desires only three things: bitter wormwood tea, cheap cigarettes, and absolute silence from a world he finds thoroughly irritating. An ailing, retired scholar of forgotten manuscripts, he maintains a pragmatic truce with the unseen: they stay in their shadows, and he stays out of their way.Until a midnight storm batters his cedar door.Standing on the wet flagstones is the medina's wealthiest antiquities dealer, drenched in rain and cold terror. Behind him on the dark stairwell, fresh split-hoof tracks ooze ditch-water beside a link of ancient, rusted iron.In the damp shadows of Dar El-Meknesi-a fortress-like riad built into the sixteenth-century ramparts-an underground renovation has breached a walled-up vault. Now, the merchant's teenage son lies in a rigid stupor. At the stroke of three every morning, the boy's vocal cords split into an ancient, guttural bray, reciting the names of forgotten plague victims from 1672-while the sound of heavy iron chains circles the courtyard tiles, creeping three feet closer to his bed every night.Something ancient and starved has awakened beneath the stone, bound by a centuries-old debt that demands marrow. And as the clock ticks toward the next third hour, Idriss quickly discovers that dry academic skepticism is a very poor shield against the dark.Atmospheric, darkly humorous, and steeped in authentic Moroccan folklore, THE HOOVES OF FEZ introduces a cynical, reluctant sleuth navigating the whispering stones of an ancient world.