Hell Gate (Alexandra Cooper Series #12) »

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.

Head of the Sex Crimes Unit of the district attorney's office in Manhattan for decades, Linda Fairstein is America's most visible legal expert on sexual assault and domestic violence-which is why she writes some of the most compelling crime thrillers of our time and why her Alexandra Cooper series has been topping bestseller list for more than a decade. Fans turn to Fairstein for ripped-from-the-headline crimes, cutting-edge investigations, and vindication for victims. Linda Fairstein brings readers inside a world of which they can't get enough, but one they hope to never see in real life. And for her twelfth novel, Fairstein takes Alexandra Cooper inside a world she'd rather not see. New York City politics have always been filled with intrigue and behind-the-scenes deals. In Hell Gate, Alex finds her attention torn between investigating a shipwreck that has contraband cargo-human cargo-and the political sex scandal of a promising New York congressman now fallen from grace. When Alex discovers that a woman from the wreck and the congressman's lover have the same rose tattoo-the brand of a "snakehead", a master of a human trafficking operation-it dawns on her that these cases aren't as unrelated as they seem and that the entire political landscape of New York City could hang in the balance of her investigation. As Alex looks on at the nameless victims in the morgue, she realizes she's looking at the present-day face of New York's long, dark tradition of human trafficking-a tradition that began hundreds of years ago with slave trade from Africa, now a multimillion-dollar industry that will stop at no cost, even if that cost is Alex's life.

Publishers Weekly

Multiple Audie Award-winning narrator Barbara Rosenblat brings her considerable talent to Fairstein's latest thriller featuring New York ADA Alex Cooper. When a boat carrying illegal human cargo shipwrecks off the city's coast, spilling its payload of immigrant contraband into the ocean, a body is discovered that appears to have been dead before it hit the freezing water. How this event in human smuggling will relate to a philandering congressman and what happens to his mistress is only part of the mystery that keeps Fairstein's story barreling forward. Rosenblat's appealing voice nicely handles the twists and turns of the author's narrative. She manages to balance numerous characters of varying ethnicities with ease, bringing a natural delivery to their dialogue while at the same time keeping them distinct enough from each other to allow for easy delineation between who's speaking to whom, but she never goes overboard or allows herself to fall into caricature. It's a fine performance that will keep the listener hooked to the very end. A Dutton hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 4). (Mar.)