When she is turned into a super-modelesque super-fighting machine, Tally, a former ugly, is ordered to keep the uglies down and the pretties stupid in a carefully engineered world of perfection where she refuses to play by the rules.

Upon Tally's sixteenth birthday she undergoes an operation to turn from an ugly duckling into a stunning girl, but she makes a promise just before the surgery to be the guinea pig for a future experiment.

The world knows Parisian private investigator Aimee Leduc, heroine of 15 mysteries in this New York Times bestselling series, as a tres chic , no-nonsense detective--the toughest and most relentless in the City of Lights. Now, author Cara Black dips back in time to reveal how Aimee first came to inherit Leduc Detective . . . November 1989: Aimee Leduc is in her first year of college at Paris's preeminent medical school. She lives in a 17th-century...

"A dying man drags his oxygen machine into the office of Eric Besson, a lawyer in Paris's 13th arrondissement. The old man, an accountant, is carrying a dilapidated notebook full of meticulous investment records. For decades, he has been helping a cadre of dirty cops launder stolen money. The notebook contains his full confession--he's waited 50 years to make it, and now it can't wait another day. He is adamant that Besson get the notebook into the...

"November, 2001: in the wake of 9/11, Paris is living in a state of heightened fear, with constant bomb alerts and heightened ethnic tension. For Aimée Leduc, November is bittersweet: the anniversary of her father's death and her daughter's third birthday fall on the same day. A gathering for family and friends is disrupted when a bomb goes off at the police laboratory-and Boris Viard, the partner of Aimée's friend Michou, is found unconscious at...

Thrilled that her former lover Yves Robert has returned to Paris, Aimee Leduc accepts his marriage proposal, but her happiness is short-lived after he is found dead in a doorway in the Rue de Paradis.

Parisian computer expert Aimeé Leduc finds herself in the midst of murder and corruption after an anonymous telephone call leads her to an abandoned baby girl.

After her godfather's girlfriend is murdered, Aimee Leduc's efforts to vindicate him lead her to police corruption, a terrorist group, and a kidnapped Spanish princess.

Aimées childhood friend, Laure, is a policewoman. Her partner, Jacques, has set up a meeting in Montmartre with an informer. When Laure reluctantly goes along as backup, Jacques is lured to an icy rooftop, where he is shot to death. Laures gun has been fired, gunpowder residue is found on her hands, and she is charged with her partners murder. The police close ranks against the alleged cop killer. Aimée is determined to clear...

Paris, July 1999: Private investigator Aimée Leduc is walking through Saint-Germain when she is accosted by Suzanne Lesage, a Brigade Criminelle agent on an elite counterterrorism squad. Suzanne has just returned from the former Yugoslavia, where she was hunting down dangerous war criminals for the Hague. Back in Paris, Suzanne is convinced she's being stalked by a ghost, a Serbian warlord her team took down. She's suffering from PTSD and her boss...