Fifteen-year-old Alison Shaw may not be beautiful, but she doesn't really care: She'd much rather read a good book than primp in front of a mirror anyway. But Alison's gorgeous mother, Risa, knows that beauty can be a key to success and wishes only the best for her daughter, especially when Risa marries a widowed plastic surgeon and moves Alison from Santa Monica to Bel Air.
Beauty may be only skin deep, but to the denizens of Bel Air it means the world.
Everywhere mother and daughter look, they are surrounded by beautiful people, many of whom have benefited from the skills of Alison's new stepfather, the charismatic Conrad Dunn.
Conrad is certain he can turn Alison into a vision of loveliness, and Risa - drawn in by his cool confidence - is delighted.
Reluctantly, Alison agrees to undergo the first procedure, and her transformation begins.
But soon Alison discovers a picture of Conrad's first wife. To Alison's horror, she notices a resemblance between the image in the photo and the work her stepfather is doing on her.
Though Risa refuses to acknowledge the strange similarity, Alison becomes increasingly frightened. Digging further into her stepfather's murky past, Alison uncovers dark secrets and even darker motives - and realizes that her worst fears might fast becoming her reality.
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Now that's what I call a wrong book description of what's actually happening in the book. I sometimes wonder who writes those. Certainly not the author who should be familiar with what he wrote.
Cut the humbug about the mother who wants her child desperately being beautiful. Nothing of that is in the book.
In fact the last four sentences are almost completely nonsense.
It seems they tried to make the book more appealing to pot. buyers but probably didn't read it because it is in fact quite good and doesn't deserve a misleading description.
Risa and Alison Shaw are getting their life together without father Michael who discovered, after years of being married, that his affection towards his own gender is his fulfillment.
Nevertheless the family plus the new addition, Scott, still stays close and Risa finally found a new man, plastic surgeon Conrad Dunn.
He's been married and lost his beautiful women due to suicide. Beautiful as she was she couldn't life with the half disfigured face a boat accident left her with.
Margot Dunn was everything but beautiful in the beginning but Conrad made her the supermodel. He transformed her into a masterpiece of natural beauty.
Alison Shaw is overwhelmed from everything that happened during the year her father left their house. She doesn't like her mothers new man, nor does she like to live in his huge, expensive house. Going to a new elite school makes everything much more difficult for her. Surrounded by teenagers that already had undergone several surgeries to become the best they could get she feels insecure of herself and her looks. Reluctantly she agrees to undergo a breast surgery, to finally fit into this nice dress she found for her sixteenth birthday, in Conrad's office.
Meanwhile young women are murdered. The killer's MO always seems to be the same except that he always takes a part of each victim with him: A nose, the lips, ears, eyebrows.
Tina Wong, star reporter, is hard on his heels, desperately trying to figure out the connections between each victim and the killer's motive. She's puzzling at a picture of what the killer is creating but doesn't seem to get much further with it.
After Alison's breast surgery all seems to go well until the whole world seems to crash down on Alison and Risa.
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What I really liked about this book was that it never got boring and is in fact a great, suspenseful mystery.
Typical for John Saul's books he picks up certain topics which built the main frame for his books. Like in
Faces of Fear one of the main characters is a teenager struggling. He again touched a serious topic with sensible, honest and modern words which made this book loveable from this perspective.
My recommendation.
Rating:
Visit
John Saul.
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books (August 12, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0345487052
ISBN-13: 978-0345487056
After the untimely death of her mother, fourteen-year-old Sarah Crane is forced to grow up quickly in order to help tend her family’s Vermont farm and look after her grieving father, who’s drowning his sorrow in alcohol. But their quiet life together is shattered when her father is jailed for killing another man in a barroom brawl and injuring Sarah in a drunken car crash. Left in the cold care of a loveless foster family and alienated at school, Sarah finds a kindred spirit in classmate Nick Dunnigan, a former mental patient still plagued by voices and visions. And in eccentric art instructor Bettina Phillips, Sarah finds a mentor eager to nurture her talent for painting.
