Alexander Otto has it all—eminence as a surgeon, admiring colleagues, a loving family. Yet from the opening lines of this modern tragedy, he is a man on the run. What secrets lie beneath the successful veneer of Alexander Otto's life? Edwina Frye is Otto's biographer, she is also having an affair with him. As she writes the official biography, she writes a parallel life of Alexander which develops into a disturbing fiction of betrayal and revenge. Under the Knife does not take comfortable sides as it swings between the slippery poles of truth and fiction, love and obsession, resplendent public achievements and unpardonable private transgressions.