Fairstein knows her subject, she spent 25 years in the Manhattan DA’s office as the leading prosecutor of sex crimes. Her book has the texture and sound of the real thing. She knows how the prosecutors, cops, and criminals think, act and talk.
In this story, an acquaintance of Alex Cooper’s, a beautiful but pushy movie star, is staying at Alex’s summer home on Martha’s Vineyard when someone blows her head off. At first, the local police think the victim is Alex, and Alex reads her own obituary in the New York newspapers the next morning. To help the police, she flies up to her summer place with New York City police detective Mike Chapman. Chapman has worked with Alex for years and is assigned to escort her, in case the killer meant to shoot Alex and got the actress by accident.
The suspects in this mystery are well drawn and nicely hidden. The other cases Alex works on are equally interesting and lend a sense of reality. They show how prosecutors with heavy workloads do not focus on one case at a time, but must keep all their cases moving forward.
Since this first book, Fairstein has written 18 more Alex Cooper mysteries. She and her fictional counterpart are said to be the inspiration for the female prosecutors on the TV show “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
In July, Fairstein was interviewed on CBS’ “Sunday Morning” program by her friend, reporter Leslie Stahl. The video can be seen here.
(For more posts on books, check out Patti Abbott’s blog.)