Under My Skin

Are women supposed to age gracefully? Rage rage against the dying of the light in the eye of the beholder? This book examines the question from several perspectives. Hannah Wolfe is hired to save a spa from a trickster; she ends up in a murder investigation. While she sorts through what she thinks of women who have their faces sliced, she also confronts her own scars - physical and other - and her fixed notions about the life her sister has chosen to lead. One review points out that Dunant's books are novels of ideas passing as mysteries. That's true. You'll think about the issues even more than who dunnit. The ending is blissfully unexpected. Dunant does great kids, when she takes the trouble. Lily, in Mapping the Edge, is a character who's stayed in my mind for years. Here, Amy gets mostly shuffled aside by the concerns of grown-ups, but she's still a stitch. Sarah Dunant is a wonderful writer. Her prose is crisp and clever and so is her detective. Hannah Wolfe colors outside the lines, but carefully. Unlike VI Warshawski and Alex Tanner, Hannah doesn't go blindly/willfully into dangerous situations; she makes phone calls telling people her location - then she steps into the shadows. I wonder if the detective's feminine name is additional evidence that Dunant is beyond feeling she has something to prove in these books. Hannah has truly evolved into an independent professional. The first-person narration is so witty that you'll laugh in inappropriate places. Hannah's a self-critical narrator, but ironic and sardonic rather than depressed or bitter. She's is such a 21st-century hero that it's a triple shame Dunant seems to have let the series lapse.

Hannah Wolfe is a young, hip London private detective. There are three Hannah Wolfe books, "Fat Farm", "Birth Marks", and "Under My Skin". In "Under My Skin", Hannah goes undercover at an exclusive spa. Someone has been playing some nasty tricks to hurt the business. It sounds like an easy job, and Hannah can get some free beauty treatments, but as usual in a Hannah Wolfe mystery, things soon get more complicated and more serious. All three of these mysteries are really well-written, intelligent, modern, and very fun to read. I really like Hannah, who is very smart, competent and resilient, and funny, without being annoyingly tough. I recommend this series very highly.

Hannah Wolfe is a private eye on a simple job to a health farm. Who is tampering the hot bats? Who replaces the massage oil with something nasty? It is all quickley revealed to make way for the real problem: the owner of the farm is married to an surgeon and something went wrong during the last six months of the marriage. One of the blurbs on the UK edition says: "the plot is crowded like a traffic jam." And it shure is! This is a book in the best english/US tradition. Not too many pages (very english), not to many but some red herrings, a little love, some personal problems and an almost happy end. It is surely not the best i've read but is quite enjoyable.