What do you think?
Rate this book
Hannah Wolfe #2
Fatlands
Chaperoning a rebellious teenager around London as part of what seems to be a boring but well-paying job, Hannah is unaware of the death threats her charge's research scientist father has been receiving, until violence erupts among animal rights activists.
214 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1993
28 people are currently reading
417 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Dunant
33 books1,621 followersSarah Dunant is a cultural commentator, award-winning thriller writer and author of five novels set in Renaissance Italy exploring women’s lives through art, sex and religion. She has two daughters, and lives in London and Florence.
Sarah’s monthly history program and podcast on history can be found via the BBC website.
Sarah’s monthly history program and podcast on history can be found via the BBC website.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
May 17, 2018
A second in the series of three crime novels penned by Sarah Dunant sees her heroine, London based private investigator, Hannah Wolfe, the wrong side of thirty and with too many morals to make for an easy life in the security business, once again in the thick of another rather complicated mess. But steering clear of trouble is never an option for hardened cynic Hannah, an idealistic PI with a subversive bent, feisty attitude and a willingness to ask the questions that others have more sense for their safety than to pursue. Despite being originally published in 1993 when the novel was awarded the CWA Silver Dagger Award and the obvious cultural references there is little to mark it out as dated beyond the focus on the animal-testing activist movement of the era. Admittedly with the campaign of action now far less prominent in the prevailing era the novel arguably loses some of its bite.
Hannah’s latest job starts with a spot of bodyguarding, acting as a chaperone-companion for fourteen-year-old public schoolgirl, Mattie Shepherd, on her big day out in London in place of her workaholic father, scientist Tom. And the only possible concern as far as Hannah is aware? A custody snatch according to her boss, Frank Comfort, but the “great kid” that he tells Hannah not to lose “on the way to the little girl’s room’ turns out to be a stroppy and petulant little madam caught slap bang between her parents divorce and paying the price. However, Mattie isn’t keen to let on to Hannah just how hurt she clearly feels, with just enough bitterness about her father’s role as head of a department searching for a cure for cancer at the pharmaceutical multinational, Vandamed. What Frank failed to mention was Tom’s prominence on the hit list of the Animal Liberation Front and the death threats he had received and when a petrol bomb obviously intended to target him takes the life of innocent Mattie on Hannah’s watch matters become very personal. But with Tom researching for a cure for cancer rather than testing for cosmetics the reason why he has attracted such vociferous hostility unsettles Hannah and she starts to dig into what could possibly have made Tom Shepherd such a target?
For Hannah, what Mattie did say is enough to delve into the matter and her unwarranted guilty conscience and obsession with the truth leads her into a dangerous encounter between a chemical giant and some very impassioned animal rights campaigners.. however, identifying where the true threat is coming from and just why Tom Shepherd was targeted proves far harder as Hannah hits a wall of silence. Recalling the exact events of the day and Mattie rooting through her father’s study, her interrupted phone call, a reported burglary and the sexy lingerie that she purchased from Harrod’s are enough to send Hannah back to her posh boarding school in Wiltshire, a hitherto unknown boyfriend in the shape of a school gardener and a sealed brown envelope in Mattie’s locker. As an intrepid Hannah ventures into a web of betrayal, lies and deceit she starts to realise that there isn’t too much difference between the animal rights dissidents and the well-heeled executives who are simply better at disguising their motives and tidying up their loose ends. As Hannah is lured further into the lucrative race for a patent and a landscape where money means more than endangering lives she starts to wonder if there was more to Tom Shepherd than Mattie knew or led her to believe.
Introspective and insightful, Dunant addresses the reader directly at key moments through the voice of Hannah and involves her audience making the action feel so much more personal and relevant. Hannah’s musing on relationships, loneliness, private healthcare and overstuffed pigs are as pointed and dryly amusing as those in her first outing, Birth Marks. And with any attempt at going undercover off the agenda after taking a thorough beating and a face like puff pastry, no one could say Hannah Wolfe takes the easy way out.. with a high comedy dance with death denouement, Fatlands is a fast, gritty and very droll return for Hannah.
Fatlands reads well as a stand-alone and the combination of a pacy yet stimulating three-dimensional plot adds depth to the investigation. Hannah sparkles throughout with her intrepid quest, colourful wise-cracks and barbed asides that belie her fierce intelligence and determination. After a superb opening with Hannah finally gaining the respect of fourteen going on twenty-four-year-old Mattie, the pause for reflection and lull after her death sees the story stall a little before inroads are made into a slew of unanswered questions. Top quality crime fiction with a robust plot comprehensively unravelled and a search for answers that is as satisfying as it is realistic, all within just over two hundred pages.
Hannah’s latest job starts with a spot of bodyguarding, acting as a chaperone-companion for fourteen-year-old public schoolgirl, Mattie Shepherd, on her big day out in London in place of her workaholic father, scientist Tom. And the only possible concern as far as Hannah is aware? A custody snatch according to her boss, Frank Comfort, but the “great kid” that he tells Hannah not to lose “on the way to the little girl’s room’ turns out to be a stroppy and petulant little madam caught slap bang between her parents divorce and paying the price. However, Mattie isn’t keen to let on to Hannah just how hurt she clearly feels, with just enough bitterness about her father’s role as head of a department searching for a cure for cancer at the pharmaceutical multinational, Vandamed. What Frank failed to mention was Tom’s prominence on the hit list of the Animal Liberation Front and the death threats he had received and when a petrol bomb obviously intended to target him takes the life of innocent Mattie on Hannah’s watch matters become very personal. But with Tom researching for a cure for cancer rather than testing for cosmetics the reason why he has attracted such vociferous hostility unsettles Hannah and she starts to dig into what could possibly have made Tom Shepherd such a target?
For Hannah, what Mattie did say is enough to delve into the matter and her unwarranted guilty conscience and obsession with the truth leads her into a dangerous encounter between a chemical giant and some very impassioned animal rights campaigners.. however, identifying where the true threat is coming from and just why Tom Shepherd was targeted proves far harder as Hannah hits a wall of silence. Recalling the exact events of the day and Mattie rooting through her father’s study, her interrupted phone call, a reported burglary and the sexy lingerie that she purchased from Harrod’s are enough to send Hannah back to her posh boarding school in Wiltshire, a hitherto unknown boyfriend in the shape of a school gardener and a sealed brown envelope in Mattie’s locker. As an intrepid Hannah ventures into a web of betrayal, lies and deceit she starts to realise that there isn’t too much difference between the animal rights dissidents and the well-heeled executives who are simply better at disguising their motives and tidying up their loose ends. As Hannah is lured further into the lucrative race for a patent and a landscape where money means more than endangering lives she starts to wonder if there was more to Tom Shepherd than Mattie knew or led her to believe.
Introspective and insightful, Dunant addresses the reader directly at key moments through the voice of Hannah and involves her audience making the action feel so much more personal and relevant. Hannah’s musing on relationships, loneliness, private healthcare and overstuffed pigs are as pointed and dryly amusing as those in her first outing, Birth Marks. And with any attempt at going undercover off the agenda after taking a thorough beating and a face like puff pastry, no one could say Hannah Wolfe takes the easy way out.. with a high comedy dance with death denouement, Fatlands is a fast, gritty and very droll return for Hannah.
Fatlands reads well as a stand-alone and the combination of a pacy yet stimulating three-dimensional plot adds depth to the investigation. Hannah sparkles throughout with her intrepid quest, colourful wise-cracks and barbed asides that belie her fierce intelligence and determination. After a superb opening with Hannah finally gaining the respect of fourteen going on twenty-four-year-old Mattie, the pause for reflection and lull after her death sees the story stall a little before inroads are made into a slew of unanswered questions. Top quality crime fiction with a robust plot comprehensively unravelled and a search for answers that is as satisfying as it is realistic, all within just over two hundred pages.
October 16, 2025
Hannah Wolfe’s job as a private investigator is rarely glamorous. In fact, she spends most of her time acting as bodyguard to rich foreign women visiting the shops and cultural highlights of London. This time it’s a girl she’s been asked to look after, though – Mattie Shepherd, whose father, Tom, was supposed to be taking her out for the day to celebrate her 14th birthday, but has dumped the task on hired help while he works. Mattie is not pleased and lets Hannah know it, but over the course of the day they tentatively connect and Hannah sympathises with Mattie’s anger and feelings of abandonment by both her workaholic dad and her mother who left them. But the day ends in a shocking episode that leads Hannah into a proper investigation and eventually into danger. She feels she owes it to Mattie to find out why someone seems to want her father dead…
I’ve been a bit vague and deliberately misleading in that little blurb to avoid spoilers. The investigation soon leads Hannah into the world of scientific experimentation and the animals rights movement. My heart sank a bit when I realised this was where we were heading, fearing that there would be a lot of gruesome horrors about how animals are treated – both farm animals and lab animals. However, Dunant gets her point across without setting out to harrow the reader too much, and I found that even my over-sensitivity to any form of animal cruelty in fiction could cope without too much difficulty. She explains what's done to pigs (those being the animals concerned in the scientific experiment at the heart of the plot) to increase the yield, but stops short of showing us any gratuitous suffering. For once, ‘tell, don’t show’ works better.
The writing is excellent. Narrated in the first person by Hannah, she’s openly riffing on the hardboiled style of Dashiell Hammett and his ilk, their detectives being the type of PI she would like to be. There’s a noirish feel to the plot, which is dark and rooted in money and corruption, but Hannah is too likeable and has too much humour in her voice for the book to be truly noir. First published in 1993, it’s of its moment – full of cultural references that might already be meaningless to people who didn’t live through that time, but that added a good deal of nostalgic fun for me since Hannah and I would have been similar ages back then.
Hannah’s personality is also very much of that time – women have never been more equal in terms of opportunities, and retaliate with blunt sarcasm towards anyone who tries to be sexist. They don’t whine about their victimhood – that only began in the 2000s – because they refuse to see themselves as anybody’s victim. Hannah belongs to the era of SLBA, as she puts it – sexual liberation before AIDS – though she’s more careful now. In this book she’s in a relationship but it’s clearly heading towards a quiet demise, through mutual lack of passion rather than conflict. Dunant handles this well, without overplaying the emotional side. However, for all her liberation, Hannah recognises that equality only goes so far – if it comes to physical violence she’s always going to be on the losing side, and Dunant doesn’t turn her into some superhuman warrior woman. Hannah has to rely on her brain to beat masculine brawn. No contest. I loved her! I thought she was an excellent female version of the Sam Spades and Philip Marlowes of an earlier era.
The underlying story is fairly straightforward but Dunant manages to add levels of complexity that keep the reader guessing till the end. The shocking event I referred to earlier is designed to look like a terrorist attack carried out by an extremist animal rights group, directed against Mattie’s father because he’s one of the scientists working on a new drug that will make pigs produce more meat more quickly. But the more Hannah digs, the more it seems that this obvious explanation might be too obvious. If not them, though, then who else would have a reason to want Tom Shepherd dead? And how far will they go if it seems that someone may be about to find out? It all builds to a satisfying thriller climax, by which time all the complexities have been cleared away and the question left is: will Hannah be able to bring the guilty to any kind of justice?
There are only three books in the Hannah Wolfe series, and I’m looking forward to reading the other two. Dunant then wrote a couple of standalone thrillers before changing over to historical fiction – a real loss to the crime genre, but her subsequent success suggests it was historical fiction’s gain. This book won the CWA Silver Dagger in 1993, beaten to the gold by Patricia Cornwell’s Cruel and Unusual, which I haven’t yet read. All I can say is: Cornwell's must be great if it’s better than this!
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
I’ve been a bit vague and deliberately misleading in that little blurb to avoid spoilers. The investigation soon leads Hannah into the world of scientific experimentation and the animals rights movement. My heart sank a bit when I realised this was where we were heading, fearing that there would be a lot of gruesome horrors about how animals are treated – both farm animals and lab animals. However, Dunant gets her point across without setting out to harrow the reader too much, and I found that even my over-sensitivity to any form of animal cruelty in fiction could cope without too much difficulty. She explains what's done to pigs (those being the animals concerned in the scientific experiment at the heart of the plot) to increase the yield, but stops short of showing us any gratuitous suffering. For once, ‘tell, don’t show’ works better.
The writing is excellent. Narrated in the first person by Hannah, she’s openly riffing on the hardboiled style of Dashiell Hammett and his ilk, their detectives being the type of PI she would like to be. There’s a noirish feel to the plot, which is dark and rooted in money and corruption, but Hannah is too likeable and has too much humour in her voice for the book to be truly noir. First published in 1993, it’s of its moment – full of cultural references that might already be meaningless to people who didn’t live through that time, but that added a good deal of nostalgic fun for me since Hannah and I would have been similar ages back then.
Hannah’s personality is also very much of that time – women have never been more equal in terms of opportunities, and retaliate with blunt sarcasm towards anyone who tries to be sexist. They don’t whine about their victimhood – that only began in the 2000s – because they refuse to see themselves as anybody’s victim. Hannah belongs to the era of SLBA, as she puts it – sexual liberation before AIDS – though she’s more careful now. In this book she’s in a relationship but it’s clearly heading towards a quiet demise, through mutual lack of passion rather than conflict. Dunant handles this well, without overplaying the emotional side. However, for all her liberation, Hannah recognises that equality only goes so far – if it comes to physical violence she’s always going to be on the losing side, and Dunant doesn’t turn her into some superhuman warrior woman. Hannah has to rely on her brain to beat masculine brawn. No contest. I loved her! I thought she was an excellent female version of the Sam Spades and Philip Marlowes of an earlier era.
The underlying story is fairly straightforward but Dunant manages to add levels of complexity that keep the reader guessing till the end. The shocking event I referred to earlier is designed to look like a terrorist attack carried out by an extremist animal rights group, directed against Mattie’s father because he’s one of the scientists working on a new drug that will make pigs produce more meat more quickly. But the more Hannah digs, the more it seems that this obvious explanation might be too obvious. If not them, though, then who else would have a reason to want Tom Shepherd dead? And how far will they go if it seems that someone may be about to find out? It all builds to a satisfying thriller climax, by which time all the complexities have been cleared away and the question left is: will Hannah be able to bring the guilty to any kind of justice?
There are only three books in the Hannah Wolfe series, and I’m looking forward to reading the other two. Dunant then wrote a couple of standalone thrillers before changing over to historical fiction – a real loss to the crime genre, but her subsequent success suggests it was historical fiction’s gain. This book won the CWA Silver Dagger in 1993, beaten to the gold by Patricia Cornwell’s Cruel and Unusual, which I haven’t yet read. All I can say is: Cornwell's must be great if it’s better than this!
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
April 9, 2016
3.25 stars
Hannah Wolfe is a private investigator, but usually her jobs are pretty mundane. She is hired to “protect” a 14-year old girl, Mattie, for one day. She has been told that Mattie’s mother may try to kidnap her. Mattie’s father is a scientist who, in trying to find a cure for cancer, tests on animals. Things go very wrong, and Hannah is left to figure out how it all happened.
It was all right, although if I put it down, I wasn’t really all that compelled to pick it up again real soon. I was afraid there might be parts that would be difficult for me to read, depending how much detail she went into in describing some of the animal testing, but it wasn’t as bad as I was afraid it might be.
Hannah Wolfe is a private investigator, but usually her jobs are pretty mundane. She is hired to “protect” a 14-year old girl, Mattie, for one day. She has been told that Mattie’s mother may try to kidnap her. Mattie’s father is a scientist who, in trying to find a cure for cancer, tests on animals. Things go very wrong, and Hannah is left to figure out how it all happened.
It was all right, although if I put it down, I wasn’t really all that compelled to pick it up again real soon. I was afraid there might be parts that would be difficult for me to read, depending how much detail she went into in describing some of the animal testing, but it wasn’t as bad as I was afraid it might be.
March 23, 2017
Sarah Dunant created a sense of urgency throughout Fatlands. Hannah, the main character, is an independent hot headed woman. She tries to deny the point that only men can use electric screwdrivers, by balancing herself on chairs tables and the staircase to get a screw in. The wall ends up winning. I read this book because of the anti-animal testing theme. One scene gives a detailed description of a factory farm pig house. None of the details are gross, but they are disturbing. There were a few times where I had to go back and read over what I just read, because in places the wording was difficult for me to understand. I would definitely read this book again. I highly suggest this book to all of you that love to read.
November 5, 2011
The main character has not become any more likable in this book and her ...issues... are long past due for getting over. The author writes well, but the characters simply don't warm up enough to care about, although she was doing well with the young girl at the beginning of the book. And, while the background research is impressive, it was less than appealing to read quite so much on animal rights, since I wasn't expecting treatise. Another book with an ending of compromise. On to book 3, as I got them from the library and feel committed to completing the task I set for myself.
February 16, 2016
I adore Dunant's Hannah Wolfe's series. This is actually the second of the 'set' of three, but it really didn't make a difference that I read it last. Hannah is so much my kind of person. She is far from perfect, but her wit is what makes her who she is. The book starts out with a real shock. I can't tell you what that is, or it would give away an important part of the story. Hannah is hired by a wealthy man as an escort to his 14-year-old daughter (that's scary right there). As one might expect, things got out of hand. Murder ensues and Hannah pursues.
January 26, 2016
Hannah Wolfe accepts the job of chaperoning teenage girl Mattie Shepherd about London for a shopping trip. Mattie's father is a busy scientist and is paying a lot of money to Hannah but Mattie is a rebel and certainly gives Hannah a run for her money. Tragic happenings here when Mattie goes to get into her fathers parked car and it explodes. Hannah is determined to find out why this happened and follows some leads and she finds herself on the end of a vicious mugging.
September 13, 2020
Parts of this are not bad, but I did feel like I was on the receiving end of a sermon a good part of the time. Amusing but not engrossing, humorous but not really funny, a mystery that isn't very mysterious. Eh.
Want to read
April 24, 2019Synopsis: PI Wolfe is chaperoning teenage rebel Mattie Shepherd around London. Then violence explodes and Hannah asks, Why?
October 19, 2025
Hannah is asked to chaperone 14 year old Mattie as she goes shopping in London for her birthday, since her father Tom is too busy to spend the day with her himself. Without wanting to give too much away, things go horribly wrong. The assumption is that an attack has been perpetrated by animal rights activists, since Tom is head of research for a company which is developing a product which will increase pork yield in pigs.
I didn't enjoy this one as much as the first in the series - it was less fun and more violent. Hannah spent quite a lot of the book being horribly and violently attacked, although bizarrely she seemed to find some of this sexually arousing. Also troubling (this was published in 1993) was Hannah's approval of Mattie's 'affair' with the (much older) gardener at her school, which was textbook predatory grooming.
I'm hoping the final instalment will be more investigation and less disfigurement and knocking out of teeth.
I didn't enjoy this one as much as the first in the series - it was less fun and more violent. Hannah spent quite a lot of the book being horribly and violently attacked, although bizarrely she seemed to find some of this sexually arousing. Also troubling (this was published in 1993) was Hannah's approval of Mattie's 'affair' with the (much older) gardener at her school, which was textbook predatory grooming.
I'm hoping the final instalment will be more investigation and less disfigurement and knocking out of teeth.
March 25, 2018
I had this book in my personal library. It was a good detective story. It's difficult to describe this book. It starts out as one thing and ends with something totally different, from the accidental killing of a young girl then introduces large farm, money grubbing pork producers who will stop at nothing. What they're doing to our food, to get the animals fattened up quicker, the crops to have higher yields sooner and we're all ingesting everything that they use. No wonder we're having more instances of cancer and other health issues. I know that this is not much of a description, but you might like it. I've read her "Birth of Venus" (not part of this series), which is another good book.
March 20, 2017
Utter drivel. Having read and loved Dunant's historical outings, especially the twice-read 'The Birth of Venus', this was utterly disappointing and even worse than the other Hannah Wolfe (one of the most annoying -and dated- protagonists encountered) novels already read.
April 15, 2018
This was a mystery novel that centered around the medication and handling of pigs to increase their meat production. It made you think twice about eating meat! I liked the spunky title character of Hannah Wolfe and it read quickly.
February 15, 2017
Good tale about pig farmers who want to increase their profitability.
January 9, 2018
Always nice seeing what Hannah is up to!
July 5, 2018
Second Hannah Wolfe series.....again this one had way to much speculation on Hannah's part so was drag-y till 3/4 through then picked up greatly...
February 3, 2023
Shocking and full of emotion. As the other Hannah novels extremely good read.
February 7, 2025
No interesting characters or setting. An ordinary whodunit.
July 9, 2025
Tiene más escenas violentas que un hilo conductor claro.
July 13, 2019
Again, no memory of reading this. It was over 10 years ago but the story is so gruesome and violent, I'd usually remember something about it. Lots of tension.
September 24, 2012
I have not read any of the Hannah Wolfe series and coming in at number 2 was not much of an issue. The novel starts off with a great deal of pace and you are hooked in, until about the half way mark and from there the 'who done it part' of the novel is less satisfying. I think it was the first person perspective that stilted the further development of the novel. Seeing everything from Hannah's perspective was kind of tiresome and really limiting. I do not have a problem with first person narrative but in this case it did not work for me. I am not sure why, maybe I just did not connect with the lead character at all. There was nothing wrong with the novel at all, I just felt it was lacking in something. Maybe there needed to be more connection between Hannah and Mattie so you apppreciated more why Hannah follows the path she does.
I like the character of Hannah but, again it is the but. There is just something elusive that makes this story go from okay to wonderful and I do not what it is. I enjoyed it, I would read more but I was not overly sold on it.
Give it a go, is all I can say, you wont waste your time reading it.
I like the character of Hannah but, again it is the but. There is just something elusive that makes this story go from okay to wonderful and I do not what it is. I enjoyed it, I would read more but I was not overly sold on it.
Give it a go, is all I can say, you wont waste your time reading it.
October 27, 2015
(3.5 stars) This is the 2nd book in the Hannah Wolfe mystery series. Hannah is offered a job escorting a teenaged girl to London to shop for her birthday. The father tells them that the reason for the security is threats from the mother, his ex-wife. While Hannah struggles with Mattie, by the end of the day, she feels like she has built up some rapport with her, until she finds Mattie rifling through her father’s office. Before she can figure out what is going on, tragedy strikes in the form of a car bomb, leaving Hannah devastated and full of unanswered questions. She finds out that the father works in the pharmaceutical industry and is on a target list for an animal rights organization. But there is more to this puzzle than initially meets the eye and Hannah becomes obsessed with the case, taking her personal life to the brink of destruction, and even risking her own life to find the truth. The clues are present along the way, but this was a clever twist to what seems like a relatively straightforward mystery.
August 4, 2016
It's been some time since I read the first of Dunant's series about Hannah Wolfe, private investigator; so it took me awhile to get into the story. Another challenge of reading novels written by and for another country's readers is that many references have no meaning. Dunant's mystery novels are written so differently from her historical novels. At least the Hannah Wolfe books have a wry humor (or should I say humour?!), and frequently the plot moves on Hannah's thoughts rather than dialogue or description. The plot has more meat (pardon the pun) than one thinks at first and toward the end, I didn't want to stop until I found out the end. I think that makes for a good book.
January 1, 2012
A quick read mystery that moved at an adventursome pace. the story line took some interesting twists as the mystery unraveled although I must say the end was pretty predictable. I would consider this a good "beach read" as it is fairly esy to pick up and put down. The female characters were the most intersting but I found the male characters rather shallow and predictable.
June 20, 2014
A pretty straightforward, solid mystery--but with a peculiar focus on gender norms, sometimes challenging them, sometimes reinforcing them. A likeable female detective. Some might be bothered by the explicit descriptions of animal testing.
I picked this up from the library because I loved a later book by the author--a historical novel set in Renaissance Venice.
I picked this up from the library because I loved a later book by the author--a historical novel set in Renaissance Venice.
September 5, 2024
I remember falling in love with this book the first time I read it! I've recently read it again and all I have to say is... I'm sure the Spanish translation makes no justice to Sarah Dunant's skillful storytelling. It's such a shame! Anyway, I really enjoyed the plot, although I kind of thought the ending could have been a little bit better.
December 24, 2016
Belongs on my threw across the room list -- I stopped reading this early work by an author I thought I liked when a "bad" character used chloroform to knock someone out. Really? Is Nancy Drew going to come to the rescue?
February 24, 2008
This is my favorite of Sarah Dunant's Hannah Wolfe mysteries -- scenes from it haunted me afterwards -- and it's uncanny how timely it is considering the massive beef recall this year. (2008)
July 28, 2008
Quirky detective who done it. Good
July 6, 2009
This wasn't as good as the first one... I got a little lost. I'll try the third though.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews