In Pursuit of Beauty

Baum, a journalist for the Hollywood Reporter, debuts with a dishy if underwhelming novel about a ghostwriter’s tangled relationship with a convict. Wes Easton visits Dr. Roya Delshad, a former Los Angeles plastic surgeon imprisoned for insurance fraud, with plans to write a magazine profile. Instead, Roya, a larger-than-life woman who’s had much work done to her own body, talks him into ghostwriting her memoir. Roya began her career at a prestigious Beverly Hills practice before striking out on her own. Her clientele consisted mostly of those who couldn’t afford her services, and she told herself she was disrupting the system by empowering her patients with good looks and getting insurance companies to foot the bill. As Wes soon learns, Roya is domineering, manipulative, and at times untruthful, and her aggressive attempts to flirt with him throw him off balance. Baum packs the novel with well-researched and fascinating details about plastic surgery, such as “lunchtime lasers” and other “quick-turnaround procedures” that give people the “Photoshopped” look, but his satirical portrait of Roya as misguided altruist doesn’t pack much of a punch, nor does he provide insight into what drives his self-serving and cynical main characters. Unfortunately, this one only goes skin deep. (July)