Under My Skin: A Hannah Wolfe Mystery (Hannah Wolfe Crime Novels (Paperback)) - Softcover

Dunant, Sarah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743269225 ISBN 13: 9780743269223

Publisher: Scribner, 2004

Synopsis

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.

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: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0743269225
• ISBN 13: 9780743269223
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272