Catfishing Caitlyn

A brilliant Yale University alumna uses her formidable intellect to solve a shadowy organization’s riddles in Imady’s globe-hopping thriller.

Caitlyn O’Keefe doesn’t know what she wants to be now that her doctoral work is done. Her father knows that she’d be in demand by intelligence agencies with her knowledge of Middle Eastern languages, history, and lore, but she just wants to dig into libraries and discover things deeply hidden. After she loses online access to Yale’s trove of books and manuscripts, she has a sexual fling with a red-haired woman to get through the night. The next morning, she finds a small ivory card with a website named after her inscribed on it. Curious, she visits the site, where she’s asked by a “panel of twelve of the world’s greatest minds in [her] field” to answer questions. After answering the first query about her studies, she receives $10,000—enough money to put off her career search for a bit—and soon, she’s off to London to view a Hijaz-script Quranic fragment before an auction, with side trips to London bookstores, Brick Lane, and the Turkish city of Konya. After she successfully answers two more of the panel’s questions, she finds her emotional reserves diminished even though she soon has a ne’er-do-well sidekick named Benji who keeps her on a more even keel. Imady’s novel feels a bit like Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code(2003) if it was focused on Middle Eastern antiquity and loaded up with sensuous culinary scenes (“The chili came in a small earthenware pot, a crock, coated with a layer of bubbling cheese with a yellow corn cake protruding from its center”). Roughly 40 pages from the end, during a crawfish meal in Georgia, it seems as if the story’s ending is obviously telegraphed—or is it? Despite some brutal plot twists, the best moments of revelation are the quiet ones, as the protagonist thinks about a text or has a meal with a friend. Indeed, readers may learn a bit about themselves in these relatable moments.

A thoughtful novel featuring ancient manuscripts and seemingly unanswerable questions.