Whitefly
SynopsisPlot
When a fourth corpse in three days washes up in Tangier with a bullet in the chest, Detective Laafrit knows this isn’t just another illegal immigrant who didn’t make it to the Spanish coast. The traffickers. The drug dealers. The smugglers. They know what it takes to get a gun into Morocco, and so does Laafrit. As his team hunts for the gun, Laafrit follows a hunch and reveals an international conspiracy to unlock the case.
Story
About this book
Four bodies surface in the waters near Tangier over the course of three days, each with a bullet wound in the chest. Detective Laafrit, working in a city where illegal crossings to Spain are common, quickly recognizes that these deaths do not fit the usual pattern of migrants lost at sea. Firearms are difficult to obtain in Morocco, and the presence of a gun points toward something organized and deliberate. Laafrit begins investigating the networks that operate along the coast, from human traffickers to drug smugglers, looking for the weapon and whoever is behind the killings.
The novel is set in Tangier, a port city on the Strait of Gibraltar where Africa and Europe are separated by roughly fourteen kilometers of open water. This geography shapes the story at every level. Smuggling routes, migration corridors, and cross-border crime form the daily landscape of Laafrit's work. As his investigation develops, a hunch leads him toward connections that extend well beyond Morocco's borders, suggesting an international dimension to the case.
Abdelilah Hamdouchi is a Moroccan author who writes crime fiction in Arabic. Whitefly belongs to a small but growing body of detective novels set in North Africa, where the genre draws on local policing realities and the specific pressures of border cities like Tangier.
