Cosmetic Surgery & James' The Private Patient

From last week's Daily Mail article "Hundreds of women with faulty breast implants jeer French businessman as he goes on trial for making millions 'selling leaky PIP silicone':"

A French businessman who made millions by selling faulty breast implants was booed by his victims as he appeared in court today charged with fraud.

Jean-Claude Mas, 74, who founded and ran implant-maker Poly Implant Prothese, is among those on trial in Marseille. The now-defunct company had claimed its factory in France exported to more than 60 countries and was one of the world's leading implant makers.

The implants, which officials say are prone to rupture and leaking, were not sold in the United States, but more than 125,000 women worldwide received them until sales ended in March 2010. Of those, more than 5,000 are joining the trial as victims, saying the executives misled them into believing the implants were safe.

For a novel set in a cosmetic surgery clinic, try P.D. James' mystery novel The Private Patient:

In James's stellar 14th Adam Dalgliesh mystery (after 2006's The Lighthouse), the charismatic police commander knows the case of Rhoda Gradwyn, a 47-year-old journalist murdered soon after undergoing the removal of an old disfiguring scar at a private plastic surgery clinic in Dorset, may be his last; James's readers will fervently hope it isn't.

Dalgliesh probes the convoluted tangle of motives and hidden desires that swirl around the clinic, Cheverell Manor, and its grimly fascinating suspects in the death of Gradwyn, herself a stalker of minds driven by her lifelong passion for rooting out the truth people would prefer left unknown and then selling it for money. Beyond the book's central moral concern, James meditates on universal problems like aging (the amorphous flattening of self)...