Cold Hit - Softcover

Fairstein, Linda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743467159 ISBN 13: 9780743467155

Publisher: Pocket, 2003

Synopsis

A chilling new Alexandra Cooper thriller from the acclaimed Manhattan Assistant D.A. who lives the gritty and glamorous life she writes.

The raves are in for Linda Fairstein's Alexandra Cooper novels. "Riveting authenticity," says Vanity Fair. "Grisham-esque," says Time. "There is an anger and a passion in Alex Cooper that is clearly not fictional," says The London Times.

From its dramatic opening scene when a silk-clad corpse washes up from the turbulent waters at Manhattan's northern tip to its stunning conclusion when Alexandra runs for her life, Cold Hit transports the reader behind the scenes with the cops, the criminals, the victims, and the denizens of the art world. Here is the authenticity, the vision, that only Linda Fairstein can provide.

On a steamy August evening, after an exhausting day in the courtroom, Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper joins her longtime pals and partners-in-investigation, NYPD detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, at a somber crime scene. In her ten years as a sex crimes prosecutor, Alex has seen many victims, but few more poignant than this one, pulled from the water with her hands and feet obscenely tied to a ladder.

Sleep comes uneasily after such a vision, but the knowledge that monsters walk the city's streets, preying on the innocent, motivates Alex and her colleagues in their sometimes heartbreaking work. Perhaps this time they will be lucky. A "cold hit" could match DNA from the crime scene with a suspect's DNA profile in the police database. Or is this case a more sinister kind of "cold hit"? Who was this latest victim?

From a luxurious Fifth Avenue apartment to famous midtown auction houses to the avant-garde galleries of Chelsea, Alex, Mike, and Mercer hunt for a killer in a very special world where priceless art meets big money in a lethal mix. Whether it's a missing Rembrandt, a Vermeer in need of authentication, or doors paneled with precious amber and missing since the great Nazi art thefts, the stakes are high, the consequences potentially fatal.

Illuminating and inspiring, Cold Hit takes us from the paint-chipped offices of cops and D.A.s to the elegant restaurants of Alex's privileged Upper East Side life. The contrast is striking, but it's all part of the extraordinary world that author Linda Fairstein has brought so vividly to life in this magnificent novel of suspense.

About this title

Review:

When Linda Fairstein describes the route Alexandra Cooper takes from the district attorney's office to NYPD headquarters, you know she's walked that way many times herself. "I took the shortcut over to One Police Plaza, cutting behind the Metropolitan Correctional Center and alongside the staggeringly expensive new federal courthouse, which made our digs, complete with oversized rodents and roaches that obviously thrived on Combat, look like judicial facilities in some third world country."

Like her fictional counterpart, Fairstein is a Manhattan assistant district attorney in charge of a sex-crimes unit. As she did in Final Jeopardy and Likely to Die, Fairstein mires her somewhat unlikely heroine (a beautiful 35-year-old blond with an Ivy League education, a house in Martha's Vineyard, and an affection for betting on quiz shows at cop bars) in a wealth of procedural detail. The "cold hit" of the title, for example, refers to a computer match between DNA samples from a recent rape case with evidence from an older crime.

With her trusty cop sidekicks Mike Chapman (who eats everything in sight and drops wisecracks like they're crumbs) and Mercer Wallace (who is a big fellow and can take a bullet meant for Alex without flinching), Cooper is working on two major cases--a serial rapist who has suddenly decided to come out of hiding and a couple of murders linked to the nasty underground world of fine-art sales. But she also has time to give her fellow sex-crime prosecutors advice on how to handle everything from a man shooting video up women's skirts at a Star Trek convention to a guy who takes his love for racehorses well past the legal limits. Once again, Fairstein has produced a story whose entertainment value is very high. --Dick Adler

About the Author:

Linda Fairstein, America's foremost prosecutor of crimes of sexual assault and domestic violence, has run the Sex Crimes Unit of the District Attorney's Office in Manhattan for more than two decades. A Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, she is a graduate of Vassar College and the University of Virginia School of Law. Her first novel, Final Jeopardy, which introduced the character Alexandra Cooper, was published in 1996 to critical and commercial acclaim, followed in 1997 by Likely to Die, which also achieved international bestseller status. Her nonfiction book, Sexual Violence, was a New York Times notable book in 1994. She lives with her husband in Manhattan.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743467159
• ISBN 13: 9780743467155
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464