The Body Beautiful Murder

Felix Witter is the reigning Mr. Universe. He is in training for the current international body-building competition—just another dedicated weight lifter with extraordinary muscular development. He is murdered during his last workout on the day preceding the annual competition, and it just so happens that the murder takes place in the gym where Max Roper does his exercising. Lucky for the innocent gym attendant who is accused of dropping a quarter-ton of iron on the Superbody, because Roper is on hand to clear up the murder and prove who really did it. Roper has to sift through the co-ed part of the gym, including a few of the exercising ladies and their reasons for wanting Witter deader than alive. Also in line for lively suspicion are jealous competitors, last year’s losers and this year’s aspirants. Felix Witter, the victim, has a broken marriage behind him, a disgruntled business agent, an irascible trainer, a jealous girlfriend, a jealous boyfriend, and a tie-in with a nutrition product and a company unable to meet his demands for more money before he goes over to a rival health-kick group. What with karate experts, weight lifters, body builders and college athletes using the gym for work-outs, obviously Roper has a lot of strong men to deal with this time, and he is forced to fight for his own life before he can come up with the killer.

Robert Graham is mugged when he's mistaken for a stalker instead of a law-abiding detective chief inspector. His loyal but over-enthusiastic dog inflicts an embarrassing wound on Graham's atacker. a peeping tom outsmarts the police force. and a fast-talking barmaid disappears just like her one-time husband, the paroled rapist. But it's someone quite different who dies. Shirley (alias Davinia) West had hoped to make her fortune as a beauty queen. Instead she makes the headlines when she's brutally murdered right under the noses of the police, who were supposedly trying to thwart the stalker, the peeping tom and the missing rapist at the time...

Stephen Killigan has been cold since the day he came to Cambridge as a junior lecturer. Something about the seven hundred years of history staining the stones of the university has given him a chill he can't shake. When he stumbles across the body of a missing beauty queen, he thinks he's found the reason. But when the police go to retrieve the body and find no trace, Killigan has found a problem - and a killer - that is the very opposite of reason. Killigan's unwitting entry into Jackamore Glass's sinister world will lead him on a trail of tattooists, philosophers, cadavers and scholars of a deadly beauty. As Killigan traces a path between our age and seventeenth century Cambridge, he must work out how a corpse can be found before someone goes missing, and whether he's at the edge of madness or an astonishing discovery.

Nose reconstructions have been common in India for centuries. South Korea, Brazil, and Israel have become international centers for procedures ranging from eyelid restructuring to buttock lifts and tummy tucks. Argentina has the highest rate of silicone implants in the world. Around the globe, aesthetic surgery has become a cultural and medical fixture. Sander Gilman seeks to explain why by presenting the first systematic world history and cultural theory of aesthetic surgery. Touching on subjects as diverse as getting a "nose job" as a sweet-sixteen birthday present and the removal of male breasts in seventh-century Alexandria, Gilman argues that aesthetic surgery has such universal appeal because it helps people to "pass," to be seen as a member of a group with which they want to or need to identify. Gilman begins by addressing basic questions about the history of aesthetic surgery. What surgical procedures have been performed? Which are considered aesthetic and why? Who are the patients? What is the place of aesthetic surgery in modern culture? He then turns his attention to that focus of countless human anxieties: the nose. Gilman discusses how people have reshaped their noses to repair the ravages of war and disease (principally syphilis), to match prevailing ideas of beauty, and to avoid association with negative images of the "Jew," the "Irish," the "Oriental," or the "Black." He examines how we have used aesthetic surgery on almost every conceivable part of the body to try to pass as younger, stronger, thinner, and more erotic. Gilman also explores some of the extremes of surgery as personal transformation, discussing transgender surgery, adult circumcision and foreskin restoration, the enhancement of dueling scars, and even a performance artist who had herself altered to resemble the Mona Lisa. The book draws on an extraordinary range of sources. Gilman is as comfortable discussing Nietzsche, Yeats, and Darwin as he is grisly medical details, Michael Jackson, and Barbra Streisand's decision to keep her own nose. The book contains dozens of arresting images of people before, during, and after surgery. This is a profound, provocative, and engaging study of how humans have sought to change their lives by transforming their bodies.

In this volume, contributors from a range of perspectives - evolutionary psychology to anthropology, sociology to cognitive and motivational psychology - explore questions of what our attractiveness preferences are and why we find certain others physically attractive, offering a fresh perspective to understanding the perception of attractiveness.

*** NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR *** A 52 year-old photographer and a 41 year-old anatomy professor are jurors sequestered during a sensational three-week trial: a toddler murdered by one of his twin sisters. At the court appointed cut-rate motel off the interstate, they fall into an intense, furtive affair, but it is only during deliberations that the lovers learn they are on opposing sides of the case. Suddenly they look at one another through an altogether different lens. After the trial, the photographer returns to her much older husband amidst an ongoing media frenzy over the case. But the judge has received an anonymous letter about the affair, and she is preparing to release the jurors names. From that point on, the photographer’s “one last dalliance before she is too old” takes on profoundly personal and moral consequences, as The Body in Question moves to its affecting, powerful, and surprising conclusion.