Feminist. Disgrace. Martyr. Joke. Qandeel Baloch was called “Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian,” the country’s first social media star — a figure of intense fascination and outrage, adored and reviled for posting videos of herself half undressed in bed, mocking mullahs and promising to perform a striptease for her viewers if Pakistan’s cricket team won a match. In 2016, the youngest of her six brothers, Waseem Azeem, strangled her while she slept, in a so-called honor killing. She was 26. Azeem was nonchalant when arrested. “You know what she was doing on Facebook,” he told the press.

In “A Woman Like Her,” an exemplary work of investigative journalism, Sanam Maher delves into the story of a woman as misunderstood in death as in life. Maher conducted hundreds of interviews — with Baloch’s family, the media, mullahs, feminist activists, experts in cybercrime — to indict the society that enabled and applauded Baloch’s murder.

Waseem Azeem and his associates killed Qandeel Baloch, Maher argues, but they did not act alone.

In her videos, Baloch often affected an American accent. She claimed to be the pampered daughter of a rich landlord. In the days before her death, however, her real identity was revealed, and a starkly different reality emerged.

Baloch was born Fauzia Azeem, one of nine children raised in a poor village in Pakistan’s Punjab Province. At 17, she was married off to her mother’s cousin. He beat and tortured her, and she fled with her young son to a women’s shelter. Her parents pleaded for her to return to her husband. Only when Baloch’s mother was preparing her daughter’s body for the funeral shroud did she see the cigarette burns on her arms.