Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Series #1) » (Reprint)

Hailed by Patricia Cornwell as "one of the most promising forces in crime fiction," former head of the Manhattan District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit Linda Fairstein has hooked readers with her intense mystery series featuring assistant D.A. -- and Fairstein's alter ego -- Alex Cooper.

Manhattan's top sex crimes prosecutor opens her newspaper one day to some shocking headlines: Sex Prosecutor Slain - FBI, State Troopers Join Search for Killer. The supposed victim is Assistant D.A. Alexandra Cooper, but Alex is still very much alive. Dead, on the wooded road leading to Alex's summer home on Martha's Vineyard, is beautiful film star Isabella Lascar. Isabella had borrowed Alex's house for a secluded holiday. Now her body has been found without any identification in a car rented in Alex's name, her face disfigured beyond recognition by the shotgun blast that took her life. The local police naturally assumed she was Alex. There are two possibilities. Somebody despised Isabella enough to trace her to Alex's Vineyard retreat. Or the killer's intended victim was Alex, and Isabella was shot by mistake. If so, the assassin may try again, and the next time Alex may not escape. With longtime friend Mike Chapman from NYPD Homicide as her temporary bodyguard, Alex must probe the Sex Crimes Unit records in the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building, searching the files of closed cases, pending sex offense complaints, and lists of convicts recently paroled. Somebody in one of those records may have hated Alex enough to wish her dead. Isabella, too, had her enemies, including a stalker who wrote letters and made threatening calls. The hunt for the killer goes on, while Alex, with her characteristic intensity and humor, continues the gritty procedures of her daily life - witness and victim interviews, courtroom appearances, serial rape investigations, and late-night precinct meetings with cops and detectives.

Publishers Weekly

The crusading longtime chief of Manhattan's Sex Crimes Prosecutions Unit brings to her exciting first novel the same passion and insights into the criminal and crime-busting minds that marked her memoir, Sexual Violence (1994). Fairstein also brings herself to the novel-or at least an alter ego of a narrator, Alexandra Cooper, who's also a middle-aged blonde heading the borough's prosecution of sex offenders. Cooper's typical day of counseling victims and working with the NYPD on sex crimes would probably keep readers fascinated, but her latest problem-the shooting murder of glamorous movie star Isabella Lascar at Cooper's getaway home on Martha's Vineyard-pitches the plot at high intensity right away. Though Cooper is warned by the DA not to play cop, she and homicide detective Mike Chapman, who's assigned to bodyguard her, work together unofficially to solve the crime, carrying on a sort of anti-romance all the while. Fairstein isn't a gifted stylist-her dialogue is as wooden as a judge's gavel-and the details of Cooper's professional and personal lives drive the story forward with more vigor than the murder investigation does. Some readers will be disappointed, too, that Cooper, like any victim, has to be rescued in the end by her fiercely protective and ingenious friends on the NYPD. But then this heroine's greatest appeal lies in the warmth of her friendships, the humanness of her mistakes and her unswerving devotion to protecting the next female from harm. As a woman with grave responsibilities who still puts her pantyhose on one leg at a time, she makes a memorable debut. Literary Guild and Mystery Guild main selections; Doubleday Book Club alternate; author tour. (June)