TO THE BONE

The day after breast augmentation, a beautiful woman becomes a beautiful young corpse when she winds up in San Francisco’s Mercy Hospital.

Physician Carroll Monks (Blood Double, 2002, etc.) pronounces lovely Eden dead. Did he misdiagnosis her in the ER and cause her tragedy? He thinks not—that is, when he’s thinking clearly and not tossing back the booze—and calls on her plastic surgeon, tony doctor D. Welles D’Anton, who may or may not have been having an affair with the deceased Eden, and indeed with his gorgeous but icy office factotum, Gwen Bricknell. D’Anton’s lesbian wife Julia retires to her studio to moon over her sculpture of the late lamented Eden. Meanwhile, clinic maintenance is in the hands of an ex–mental case, and Stover Larrabee, Monks’s insurance-investigations partner (since when does an ER doctor have time for a sideline?), is uncovering Eden’s porno background. More beauties die, of course, while Monks keeps drinking, sexual come-ons are proffered and declined, and there’s every indication that a serial murderer is loose—along perhaps with a very jealous one-shot killer on the side.

The medical jargon (“I need the hematocrit stat”) and folderol about undetectable toxins that dominate the beginning are soon supplanted by smutty sexcapades. Choose your poison.