This image is the cover for the book Birth Marks, The Hannah Wolfe Crime Novels

Birth Marks, The Hannah Wolfe Crime Novels

A missing-persons case isn’t what it seems in this page-turning thriller from CWA Silver Dagger Award–winning author Sarah Dunant

Tough-talking PI Hannah Wolfe takes whatever cases she can get. This time, it’s a missing person: Carolyn Hamilton, a twenty-three-year-old ballet dancer, has seemingly vanished into thin air. But while Hannah chases down dead-end leads, the dancer’s body is fished out of the Thames. She was eight months pregnant.

The police claim she committed suicide, but Hannah doesn’t buy the official verdict. The private eye refuses to believe that Carolyn would kill herself and her unborn child, but she’s convinced that her death is somehow connected to the pregnancy. Hannah’s quest to find the baby’s father takes her to France, where an unusual ad Carolyn answered leads to an old, moneyed family keeping monstrous secrets. And not even Hannah can guess at a deception that stretches back decades. Forced to confront her own ambivalent feelings about commitment and motherhood, Hannah won’t rest until she gets justice for Carolyn—even if it means risking her own life.

This thinking person’s thriller from New York Times–bestselling author Sarah Dunant introduces a female sleuth—reminiscent of P. D. James’s Cordelia Gray, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone—who readers are bound never to forget.

Birth Marks is the 1st book in the Hannah Wolfe Crime Novels, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Sarah Dunant

Sarah Dunant (b. 1950) was born in London and studied history at Cambridge University. After a short stint as an actress, she lived and worked in Japan, and traveled widely in Asia before returning to London to start work with the BBC as a cultural journalist. For the next twenty-five years, she ran two simultaneous careers: presenting and producing arts programs for television and radio; and writing novels, screenplays, contemporary thrillers, and a set of three crime novels starring PI Hannah Wolfe. During the late 1990s, Dunant returned to her first love, history, and throughout the last fifteen years has produced five novels set during the Italian renaissance, fusing cutting-edge historical research with dynamic story lines. The first three investigated the lives of women, as mothers, wives, courtesans, and nuns. Her most recent, Blood and Beauty, dramatizes the real history—as opposed to popular myths—of the Borgia family and the remarkable period of Italian history in which they lived. The as-yet-untitled sequel will be published in early 2017. She has taught renaissance studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and is a tutor in the creative writing masters program at Oxford Brookes University, where she is about to be awarded a doctorate of letters. Dunant has lectured at festivals and conferences around the world and is an accredited lecturer with NADFAS (National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Society) in the UK.
 

Open Road Integrated Media