* An exceptional novel from the winner of the 2000 Booker Prize

An Eve Dallas investigation. New York in the year 2058 is very different from the New York of today. Guns have been outlawed but lasers can kill, and the police still have a hefty job to do. Two men are discovered murdered. They have links - both with each other, and with Eve's new husband, Rourke.

Tally lives in a world where your sixteenth birthday brings aesthetic perfection: an operation which erases your flaws, transforming you from an 'Ugly' into a 'Pretty'. She is on the eve of this event, and cannot wait for her life to change. As well as guaranteeing supermodel looks, life as a Pretty seems to revolve around having a good time.

Property is theft, so they say, and in this novel, the property is both an abundant sugar plantation and the former slave who is now the owner's mistress and the mother of his only child.

'No matter how many times you looked at the horror man inflicted on man, you never saw it all. As Lieutenant Eve Dallas stood over what had once been a woman, she wondered when she would see worse than this...

The maid at the Roarke Palace Hotel has been murdered by Sly Yost, a virtuoso of music and assassination, a hit-man for the elite. Detective Eve Dallas is aware that knowing Sly did it is no help because someone with a personal motive was behind the murder, and her husband Roarke is probably the next target.