Fairstein, Linda. The Bone Vault

This series has never let me down. Intelligent writing with witty dialogue, fast-paced suspense, and gritty details abound as does an excellent modern panoply of relationships. Alexandra Cooper is the Assistant District Attorney in charge of Sex Crimes for the city of New York. Fairstein is a veteran sex crime investigator from Manhattan and writes it just like she knows it -- sparing no punches but emphasizing the victims as people and the criminals as human.

The first in the series, Final Jeopardy, introduces DA Alex and her cracker-jack team of NYPD detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace and the running Final Jeopardy game theme that helps define both their interpersonal relationship and the constant danger they find themselves in. This is a series that when read in order allows the reader to get more than the excellent plotting and snappy dialogue.

Other books in the series following Final Jeopardy are Likely To Die, Cold Hit, and The Deadhouse.

In this fifth outing together, Cooper must unravel the mystery surrounding a museum curator whose mummified body turns up in an ancient sarcophagus just before it's shipped out of the country. Together with her partners, cops Chapman and Wallace, Alex retraces Katrina Grooten's steps from her native South Africa to the discovery of her remains on a New Jersey pier. Along the way, the mysteries of the ancient world get equal billing with the more contemporary whodunit, and Cooper and her pals get a firsthand look at the murderous New York art world, too.

The politics of the City of New York is not new to this series, and Fairstein slips in the usual infighting among her colleagues to make things even more interesting; however, the politics of the money being gathered and spent by the museums was an enlightening foray into something the layman rarely sees.

Fairstein covers an amazing array of topics in her books -- this one touches on the poaching of human remains from Africa and the Inuits who lived in the Museum of Natural History. The reality of September 11, 2001 is recounted in humane but vivid detail and Fairstein's treatment of what it did to those living and working in New York City is chilling and elegiac all at once.

I do get a tad impatient when Alexandra gets herself into trouble. It seems that she should know better by now; however, I forgive these lapses of bad decision because the story hums along, the plotting is brisk, and she always throws at least one good twist in at the end that I often never see coming.

Those of you who enjoy the relationship parts of books will note that the complex relationship between Chapman & Cooper is being acknowledged and that her friends are truly her family. The author does place well, especially the NY street descriptions and her haven on Martha's Vineyard. She makes you hungry for the food she describes and the people in her life. And gives her readers a page-turning, thrilling ride. And you cannot wait for the next one.

Leane M. Ellis, January 31, 2003.