Birth Marks (A Hannah Wolfe Mystery)

From Publishers Weekly
The tough-as-nails young female sleuth who debuts here is London-based private eye Hannah Wolfe. Hired by an aging former dancer to find a lithe and pretty ballet prodigy who has gone missing, Hannah learns that young Carolyn Hamilton, whose nerves required Valium and whose tender ankles needed medication, has left a trail of impersonal postcards and some hefty credit-card debts. Hannah has barely begun to dig when Carolyn's body--which reveals that she was eight months pregnant--turns up in the Thames. The trail back to her drowning leads across the English Channel to a wealthy family and an old man close to death with no apparent heirs. A refreshing Londoner with an appealing softness under her slick, self-effacing surface, Hannah skirts cheap gumshoe patter. Everywhere she turns she sees youngsters, parents and those who want badly to become parents, and all of seem germane to her nicely resolved case and her awareness that the snooze button on her own biological clock isn't working as it used to. Dunant also wrote Snow Storms in a Hot Climate. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
When sometime private eye Hannah Wolfe is hired to track down Carolyn Hamilton, a missing ballet dancer, it doesn't take her long to find discrepancies between Carolyn's innocuous postcards to her guardian and her disappearance from London months ago. In the meantime, though, Carolyn and her near-term fetus are dead, drowned in the Thames. A new, carefully anonymous client's commission to get to the bottom of Carolyn's death leads Hannah to the French estate where Carolyn took her last job for dying Jules Belmont, of Belmont Aviation, and his young wife Mathilde. There's need of further improbable channel-hopping and some detailed medical revelations, but strong plotting by Dunant (Snow Storms in a Hot Climate, 1988) makes it all worthwhile. Thoughtful, tough-minded Hannah compares herself to every detective under the sun but P. D. James's Cordelia Gray, whose fans should welcome her with open arms. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
In Birth Marks, private investigator Hannah Wolfe gets a case worthy of the great detective novels she so admires. At first glance, this one doesn't fit the bill: she's asked to find a missing ballet dancer, Carolyn Hamilton. When Carolyn's body is fished out of the Thames, stones in her pockets and an eight-month-old fetus in her belly, the police think it's a no-brainer: Single pregnant woman can't face her impending responsibilities, takes a leap off a bridge. But Hannah can't shake the suspicion that something else is going on. Hannah's investigation takes her from the London dance world to the upper echelons of Parisian society in search of the unborn child's father. But his explanation only raises more questions, and for Hannah the case grows more treacherous, fueling her own ambivalent feelings about relationships and motherhood.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1992 by Sarah Dunant


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The tough-as-nails young female sleuth who debuts here is London-based private eye Hannah Wolfe. Hired by an aging former dancer to find a lithe and pretty ballet prodigy who has gone missing, Hannah learns that young Carolyn Hamilton, whose nerves required Valium and whose tender ankles needed medication, has left a trail of impersonal postcards and some hefty credit-card debts. Hannah has barely begun to dig when Carolyn's body--which reveals that she was eight months pregnant--turns up in the Thames. The trail back to her drowning leads across the English Channel to a wealthy family and an old man close to death with no apparent heirs. A refreshing Londoner with an appealing softness under her slick, self-effacing surface, Hannah skirts cheap gumshoe patter. Everywhere she turns she sees youngsters, parents and those who want badly to become parents, and all of seem germane to her nicely resolved case and her awareness that the snooze button on her own biological clock isn't working as it used to. Dunant also wrote Snow Storms in a Hot Climate. (Oct.)


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