A businessman dealing in alien furs falls for a young woman he learns is a "Spare Parts Girl" for a fading video star, with disastrous results, in Michael G. Coney's The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch.
I came across this in a box of books at a flea market and was interested in the title, and the promise of the kind of psychedelic sci-fi I have grown to appreciate as an adult (this one came out in 1975). I learned Coney was a British science fiction writer with a steady output.
This has a lot of funny world-building, taking place in a town clinging to what appears to be what's left of California after the rest of it slid into the ocean, whose inhabitants are hung up on para-gliding and making pets out of dangerous sea life like sharks--and an ambulatory one (set up with a water-breathing device so that he can wander around the surface) has a significant role in the story.
The core of the story features the idea that prisoners can have their sentence reduced by becoming "bonded" servants to business people--but part of the deal is that they have to donate organs and limbs if the business person needs it. A "3-V" star in a love triangle with the protagonist and her own "Spare Parts Girl" drives the narrative.
To me, the story is marred a bit by a passive, unlikable protagonist who uses and discards several women, which as it happens causes great harm to them. The ending has a strikingly dark note.
It's interesting to me that Kazuo Ishiguro's literary novel Never Let Me Go from 2005 has a surprisingly similar plot, though used to show class divides rather than paperback sci-fi genre beats. Ishiguro was 20 or 21 when this book came out in England, where he lived, and I can't help wondering whether he read it, and it percolated in the back of his young mind for a long time. Fun to think about.
This was also published as The Girl with A Symphony in Her Fingers, which is another trippy title.
