Neil Greaves knows the price of almost everything in Cairo.

A British cultural correspondent and antiquities consultant living above a bookshop in the Gamaleya, he moves easily through cafés, shrines, dealer’s rooms, rooftop bars, abandoned houses, and the shadowed lanes of the old city. He knows who lies well, who pays in cash, which objects can travel, and which questions are better left unasked.

Then he meets Ibrahim Abu Zahir.

Imam, custodian, judge, strategist, and guardian of the city’s sacred things, Abu Zahir operates according to laws older and less negotiable than Greaves’s professional ethics. When a stolen yashmak attributed to Sayyida Nafisa passes through Greaves’s hands, he sees profit. Abu Zahir sees a sacred object that must be returned. Greaves thinks he can deceive everyone.

Cairo has other plans.

Across twelve linked cases, Greaves is drawn into a hidden world of stolen relics, desert tombs, serpent-guarded caches, forged textiles, veiled women, private collectors, hotel thieves, sacred shrines, and old houses whose windows open onto more than one kind of danger. A death-ring hidden in the Pyramid of Meidum. A gold-and-lapis bangle glimpsed through a lattice. A Hatshepsut scarab sought by the Father of Thieves. A whispered haunting staged in the rooms of the dead. A city where every object has a history, every bargain has a moral cost, and every locked drawer can be opened by someone more patient than its owner.

Wry, atmospheric, and richly layered, THE VEILED CITY is a Neil Greaves casebook of Old Cairo — a place where antiquities are never merely antiques, the sacred is never safely past, and the clever foreigner is usually the last man to understand the game.