Under My Skin: A Hannah Wolfe Mystery - Hardcover

Dunant, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684815214 ISBN 13: 9780684815213

Publisher: Scribner, 1995

Synopsis

In Under My Skin, private eye Hannah Wolfe checks into the sumptuous health spa Castle Dean - for work reasons, of course. While being plucked, crimped, steamed, and oiled, she also investigates sabotage. Fish in the jacuzzi and steel nails in the massage heads are not the kind of gimmicks to appeal to the clinic's wealthy clients. But sabotage is just the beginning.
The owner of the spa, the dazzling Olivia Marchant, has also got problems with her marriage: someone is threatening her husband Maurice, one of London's leading cosmetic surgeons and a man responsible for reconstructing many of the world's rich and famous.
In a culture where no one wants to grow old and where everyone believes in the power of the knife, Hannah is an alien visitor. Her investigation takes her into casinos, the backstage world of rock stars, the living room of an artist who specializes in overweight women, and into Maurice's consulting room itself.
Hannah discovers a world in which people will do almost anything in the name of beauty - perhaps even commit murder.

About this title

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0684815214
• ISBN 13: 9780684815213
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288