Hannah Wolfe Books in Order

The Hannah Wolfe novels introduce a modern private investigator who lives and works in London at the end of the twentieth century. Hannah is sharp and stubborn, with a dry sense of humour and a healthy suspicion of authority, but she is also physically and emotionally vulnerable in ways that matter to the cases she takes.

In Birth Marks she is hired to trace a young ballet dancer who has gone missing from a London company. The job turns darker when the dancers body is pulled from the Thames, heavily pregnant, and the police call it suicide. Hannah is not convinced, and the trail leads her from cramped bedsits and rehearsal rooms to the rarefied world of wealthy patrons.

Fatlands sends her into even more explosive territory. What looks like a routine bodyguard job, escorting a rebellious teenager on a shopping trip, turns into a violent attack linked to the Animal Liberation Front and to a company that uses animals in research. The book digs into activism, terrorism and the way violence reverberates through families as well as politics.

By Under My Skin Hannah is still recovering from injuries and trauma, and her new assignment takes her to a luxury health spa that markets youth and perfection. Someone is sabotaging equipment and threatening a famous cosmetic surgeon whose clients include the rich and powerful. The setting allows Dunant to examine the beauty industry from the inside, asking what it costs to keep up appearances and who pays the real price.

Across the trilogy Hannah juggles unpaid bills, complicated friendships and a complicated family life with the demands of investigation. The books are full of the details of 1990s London traffic, food, music and cheap flats, but they also pause for the kind of ethical questions that do not usually trouble hard boiled detectives.

Readers who come for fast plots get car chases, stakeouts and late night confrontations. Those who read more closely find thoughtful stories about violence against women, the pressures around motherhood, the right to control ones own body and the compromises that women in the city are asked to make in work, love and politics.