Lethal Legacy

When Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper is summoned to Tina Barr’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she finds a neighbor convinced that the young woman was assaulted. But the terrified victim, a conservator of rare books and maps, refuses to cooperate with investigators. Then another woman is found murdered in that same apartment with an extremely valuable book, believed to have been stolen. As Alex pursues the murderer, she is drawn into the strange and privileged world of the Hunt family, major benefactors of the New York Public Library and passionate rare book collectors.

Eventually Alex connects their internal family rivalries to a priceless edition of Alice in Wonderland, which also contains the world’s oldest map. Would one of the well-bred Hunts be willing to kill for the treasures? The search for the answer takes Alex and her team on a breathtaking chase from Manhattan’s grandest apartments to the secret tunnels and chambers of the New York Public Library, and finally to a nineteenth-century underground vault. There, in the pitch-black darkness, Alex comes face-to-face with the killer who values money more than life.

Featuring a cast of elite, erudite, and downright eccentric characters, and a complex trail of clues that will have you guessing until the final pages, Lethal Legacy is Linda Fairstein’s most beguiling thriller yet.

Okay, there are two kinds of people reading this review: those who have already read Linda Fairstein and her terrific series featuring sex crime unit ADA Alexandra Cooper and her sidekick, NYPD Detective Mike Chapman, a man so real to me I once had him help out one of my own fictional characters. And those of you who, uh, haven't.

For those who have, let's make this quick. Lethal Legacy is great. No worries. It is filled with what you already love about her books--the characters, the plot twists, the suspense, the heightened realism that only someone who has truly walked the walked (for those living in a cave, Linda Fairstein was the ADA who helped create the sex crimes unit in Manhattan) can provide.

On top of that, Fairstein had done some wonderful research on the New York Public Library. She weaves the lore of this legendary edifice into a nifty mystery that starts off as a harrowing missing-person-homicide case--but blossoms into something far deeper. I think I dug the parts involving the NYPL most of all.

In short, stop wasting your time reading this and dive in. You already know what to expect.

To those who haven't read Fairstein and thus haven't yet "chilled" with Cooper and Chapman, well, what's the deal? Lethal Legacy is a great place to start--my personal favorite in this New York Times bestselling series. Don't you love finding a new author with a big backlist? Me too.

So here's what you do. See that yellow box up in the right-hand corner? Click it now and see what the fuss is all about. You'll thank me later.