In his debut novel, “In Pursuit of Beauty,” veteran investigative journalist Gary Baum draws inspiration from years of interviewing Los Angeles’s most provocative and compelling figures to create the fictional cosmetic surgeon Dr. Roya Delshad – or as the media dubs her, the Robin Hood of Roxbury Drive.

“There’s so much psychology and sociology in plastic surgery, in the pre-op and the post-op parts of it,” Baum says over a recent Zoom call. “The actual operation is very technical, but beforehand and afterwards, it’s all about the mind.”

The larger-than-life Dr. Delshad, who’s “reshaped her fate” with scalpels, silicone, and syringes, insists her crimes are victimless. While she’s technically taking from rich insurance companies and giving to the poor (or at least those unable to afford elective nips and tucks), Dr. Delshad sees herself as a martyr who’s been “beatified for beautifying.”

The socioeconomic differences between young Roya and her 90210 peers were apparent from an early age. She was raised in a duplex by a single mother, “barely-in-the-city-limits” of Beverly Hills. While her sister was the carbon copy of their beautiful mother, Roya “went totally wrong in the blending of DNA code” and not only was she willing to take out substantial loans to go under the knife herself, she was driven to give the gift of physical self-confidence to others. First, through becoming a surgeon and then through committing insurance fraud on her lower-income patients’ behalf.

“My story is nearly, if not wholly, universal,” Dr. Delshad writes in the book. “It’s natural to want. It’s human to strive. It’s American to dream beyond born circumstance. . . To reinvent yourself, to perfect yourself, to navigate your heart and emerge triumphant from the chrysalis of your past self: It’s what my life is about. It’s what my practice was about. It’s what led me to do what I did.”

When a strapped-for-cash patient comes to see Dr. Delshad for chin and jaw augmentation, the doc decides to cross a line, telling the insurance company that there was a medical necessity on account of TMJ, headache and dry mouth. Why not throw in an exaggerated story of a jaw-crunching fall on buckled pavement to score her a genioplasty, too? This was Dr. Delshad’s grift, and she swindled physical perfection for more than 100 willing (and grateful) patients.

 Like books? Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more

“I was interested in the dynamic of having a figure who presents a strong energy and has a view of the world that’s unstoppable,” Baum says. “They may have their own internal vulnerabilities, but the way that they perform, particularly with somebody who might be poking them, is to have a certain confidence.”

Baum knows the type well.

Over his more than 15-year tenure at The Hollywood Reporter (and full disclosure, I interned at THR in the summer of 2019 and saw Baum in action), he’s written myriad acclaimed features, including one on infamous Hollywood madam to the stars Heidi Fleiss, and LA’s original influencer before there were influencers – Sunset Blvd. billboard pinup Angelyne. Baum’s feature on Angelyne served as the basis for the Emmy-nominated Peacock series starring “Shameless” actor Emmy Rossum in the title role.

The story that planted the seed for “In Pursuit of Beauty,” though, was Baum’s investigation into Sandra D’Auriol, who leaped to her death from a Camden Drive building less than 24 hours after having a facelift in 2014.

“It made me think about this milieu of cosmetic surgery, of Beverly Hills,” Baum says. “From talking to surgeons and patients while I was working on the story, there’s a rich terrain that I just hadn’t seen in any sort of serious [literary] fiction.”

How this Altadena audiobook narrator built her booth and business from the ground up

Initially interested in writing a profile on the now-imprisoned and infamous surgeon, Los Angeles-based freelance journalist Wes Easton is quickly convinced to relinquish the narrative control and ghostwrite Dr. Delshad’s memoir instead. The collaboration leads to a sexually charged and ethically blurry entanglement. Baum nods to the pas de deux between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling of “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Easton “feels like he’s being calculated” in his approach and encounters with Dr. Delshad, “but that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to come up against very crafty, calculating subjects,” Baum says.

The result is a braided account of the story: Dr. Delshad’s memoir, which details her antihero origin story fraught with body image issues, her ascent through the ranks of the Beverly Hills cosmetics world, and the culmination of her crimes and their aftermath, written like a dishy tell-all. And Easton’s account of the story, from the initial jailhouse encounters to the completion of the book, written like an LA-noir procedural with Easton filling the shoes of the private investigator and Dr. Delshad the quintessential femme fatale.

While “In Pursuit of Beauty” reads like a spicy thriller with sharp and charged dialogue à la “Double Indemnity,” the novel delves beneath the surface of modern culture and examines what it means to be (and desperately yearn to be), well, hot.

33 new books you’ll want to read this summer from independent publishers

“I began working on this around 2015, and then Jia Tolentino is writing about ‘Instagram Face‘ in The New Yorker in 2019, and then, just in the past month or two, you have Kylie Jenner and her mom owning very transparently their plastic surgery and saying, ‘This is the particular CC’s I got in my breast implants, and this is my doctor.’ There’s a sort of ownership of one’s bodily self as part of one’s larger self-situation that is a shift in the culture,” Baum says. “All of that is going on while you have these advances in technology that allow people to, in real time, retouch images and video of themselves.”

While Beverly Hills may have once served as the central hub of the aesthetically obsessed, Instagram, reality TV, and the increasing accessibility of injectables like Botox, fillers, and Ozempic have recalibrated beauty standards and brought them front and center to far-reaching screens. Attaining Instagram-standard beauty is no longer just a genetic blessing; it’s become a matter of socioeconomic status — a symbol of the haves versus have-nots.

“There’s a class element to the book. It’s not there on every page, but it’s both an undercurrent and at times, a plot device,” Baum says. “The fact that [Roya’s] immediate family struggled with money, to a degree, made her somewhat more sensitive to other people’s needs later on. I’m very interested in — and this might come from spending so much time working at (basically) a business publication, which is really about different ways of dealing with capital — culture under capitalism.”

“She views the world as a marketplace, a sexual marketplace and also just in sheer economic terms,” Baum continues. “And I always find it interesting when people create a narrative of questions of privilege, particularly in the last five to 10 years, people wielding questions of their privilege or lack thereof at each other.”

‘The Sisters’ author Jonas Hassen Khemiri says he was cursed

Before Dr. Delshad agrees to collaborate with Easton, she makes him acknowledge his privilege. “I want you to admit an obvious yet uncomfortable fact: You’re — objectively speaking — extremely handsome.”

“You want to write about me? You want to be my ‘conduit,’ or whatever pretentious thing you just said?” Dr. Delshad says to Easton. “My story is about the pursuit of beauty. Specifically: the terrible costs and pains and hopes and dreams of that pursuit. The truth of it, for most people, isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s irresolvable and it’s bound up in all sorts of things—aspiration, longing, regret.”

Baum will discuss “In Pursuit of Beauty” with journalist August Brown at Book Soup in Los Angeles on Friday, June 27 at 7 p.m.

Originally Published: June 26, 2025 at 5:25 PM PDT