Under My Skin: A Hannah Wolfe Mystery

by Sarah Dunant

Overview

A decade before her dazzling breakthrough novel, The Birth of Venus, Silver Dagger Award-winning author Sarah Dunant won critical acclaim for her Hannah Wolfe crime novels.
In Under My Skin, private investigator Hannah Wolfe's cushy new assignment takes her to the sumptuous Castle Dean health spa. While being plucked, crimped, steamed, and oiled, Hannah is ideally placed to probe some reported cases of sabotage — fish in the Jacuzzi and steel nails in the massage heads. But spa owner Olivia Marchant has other problems besides sabotage. Someone is threatening her husband, Maurice, one of London's leading cosmetic surgeons and the man responsible for reconstructing many of the world's rich and famous. In a culture where no one wants to grow old and everyone seems to believe in the power of the knife, Hannah feels like an alien visitor. People will do anything in the name of beauty — perhaps even commit murder.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743269223
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	07/01/2004
Series:	Hannah Wolfe Series , #3
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Sarah Dunant has written eight novels, including The Birth of Venus and three Hannah Wolfe novels—Birth Marks, Fatlands, and Under My Skin. She has worked widely in print, television, and radio. Now a full-time writer, she lives in London and Florence.

Hometown:

London, England

Date of Birth:

August 8, 1950

Place of Birth:

London, England

Education:

B.A., Cambridge University, 1973

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

It was like a Cézanne painting: all those fabulous fleshy women, insolent, languid, apparently complicit in the painter's gaze. There were six or eight of them, all shapes and sizes, some stretched out on benches, others propped against tiled walls, stomach muscles relaxed with small sausage rolls of fat pulling down into their pubic hair. A fog of steam was turning to water around them, dribbling down their skin onto the cream-colored tiles. One of them, a particularly handsome figure with round, heavy breasts and big thighs, lifted her hand slowly, slicking back damp hair and letting her head fall back with a sigh that mingled into a hiss of steam. It was a gesture of extreme languor, reminiscent of a kind of erotic exhaustion. Too hot to speak, too hot to think. It made me ache to join her.

No doubt about it. This was one case where it would be morally acceptable for a girl to take off her clothes. I closed the small viewing grill and turned to the woman by my side. "I'd better get changed, don't you think?"

Copyright © 1995 by Sarah Dunant

Editorial Reviews

Sunday Times (London) What Dunant does brilliantly is to use the thriller for the novel of ideas.

London Sunday Times A fictional voice that is as barbed and wisecracking and lucid and laid-back as Chandler's.

From the Publisher

At Castle Dean health spa in Berkshire, someone is out for revenge. Carp have been boiled in the spa's Jacuzzi, maggots mixed into the yogurt and acid blended into the massage cream. Initially reluctant to take the case, British PI Hannah Wolfe (last seen in Fatlands) steels herself to 200-a-day beauty treatments while she searches for both saboteur and motive. Hannah's quick resolution of the case convinces spa owner Olivia Marchant that Hannah should look into a series of threatening notes received by her husband, a renowned "aesthetic surgeon." While cross-checking Castle Dean clients with Dr. Marchant's patient list, Hannah is introduced to a world where body parts are enlarged, reduced and sculpted and self-image is created on the surgeon's table. But this pursuit of the ideal often leads to disappointment, which in turn, inspires lawsuits, suicide and, finally, murder. Hannah, with a self-described "attitude problem," is a witty, and competent PI, a little like Kinsey Milhone, but very much her own woman. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly