DROP DEAD BEAUTIFUL, Michael Conniff’s mystery novel set in Aspen, races to a climax with the whereabouts of Amanda Madison, the woman Arnold Bagdikian loves. “Without warning,” Arnold Bagdikian writes, “Chance ripped open her blouse and the buttons tinkled to the floor. It was the strangest thing. She could chug all the human placenta she wanted, but Diana Campobello was still an old woman suffering from old age, and her breasts should have been showing the march of time just like every other part of her body. Instead they were blown up into perfect rounded mounds by the silicon reinforcements beneath the skin, her sea of wrinkles still visible like traces on tracing paper, the nipple tiny in comparison and losing all color, as if bleached by the sun. Her breasts were huge and not unattractive on a standalone basis, but rising up as they did in defiance of gravity on what would soon be a corpse rendered them both absurd and unsettling.”