Book excerpt: One Friday evening Daniel de Luc, an elusive crime writer with a deep love of poetry, disappears from a Camps Bay apartment while cooking pasta. His wife Paola, desperately worried after days of hearing nothing, is contacted by an eccentric stranger who claims to have known her missing husband under a different name and warns her not to look for him. Paola soon learns that her husband was involved in the shadowy world of the international sex industry, where well-heeled women pay men to become the anonymous fathers of their children. As her neat, controlled existence is turned inside out, Paola struggles to keep a level head and find her own humanity while trying to outwit her enemies and stay alive. The result is a fast-paced thriller that shifts between Cape Town and Paris, blending realism with the fantastic and pitting love against the attraction of sexual adventure.