The Bone Vault: A Novel - Hardcover

Fairstein, Linda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743223543 ISBN 13: 9780743223546

Publisher: Scribner, 2003

Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling author and renowned former Manhattan prosecutor follows her Nero Award-winning The Deadhouse with a mesmerizing new Alexandra Cooper novel set at the crossroads of big money, high culture, and murder...

The Bone Vault begins in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's glorious Temple of Dendur, where wealthy donors have gathered to celebrate a controversial new exhibit.

An uneasy mix of scholarship, showbiz, and aggressive marketing, "A Modern Bestiary" will be a joint venture of the Met and the American Museum of Natural History. With its IMAX time trips and Rembrandt refrigerator magnets, the "Bestiary" has raised fierce opposition from some of New York's museum elite.

Assistant DA Alexandra Cooper, off duty for the evening, observes the developing tensions with bemused interest until Met director Pierre Thibodaux pulls her aside. He needs her advice. There's an urgent problem out at a loading dock on a New Jersey pier.

A Twelfth Dynasty mummified princess, enclosed for eternity in a huge stone sarcophagus, is about to take a long voyage to Cairo as part of a routine museum exchange. But Cleopatra is missing, and in her place is the not-so-mummified body of a woman many centuries younger than her royal predecessor.

Who is this woman with the small physique, the dark hair, and the shiny barrette? What is her connection, if any, to the rarefied world of priceless art and objects? And how and when did she become entombed in the sarcophagus?

Teaming with cops Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, Alex must explore behind the scenes at the elegant but severe Metropolitan, travel uptown to the remote setting of the Cloisters and its medieval trove of funerary art, and on to the massive array of beasts and bones at the Museum of Natural History. Somewhere deep within the bowels of one of these great cultural centers, a killer may wait.

Atmospheric, chilling, and rich with the kind of procedural authenticity that only Linda Fairstein can provide, The Bone Vault is a page-turning tour de force from one of crime writing's brightest stars.

About this title

Review:

One of the special pleasures of this lively series, written by a veteran sex-crimes investigator for the Manhattan district attorney's office, is the unusual glimpse it gives readers into corners of New York no tourist and few residents ever see (The Deadhouse). Here she turns her attention to the city's major cultural edifices--the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Natural History, and the Cloisters--and takes us behind their sealed doors to investigate the murder of 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 Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, assistant DA Alexandra Cooper 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. Fairstein's thrillers offer an in-depth tour of truly off-the-beaten-path Manhattan as well as solid plotting, well-drawn characters, and snappy dialogue. What the DA's office lost when the author retired to write full-time is the mystery fan's biggest gain! --Jane Adams

About the Author:

Linda Fairstein was for twenty-five years America's foremost prosecutor of crimes of sexual assault and domestic violence as head of the Sex Crimes Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. A Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, she is a graduate of Vassar College and the University of Virginia School of Law. Recipient of the prestigious Nero Wolfe Award for "literary excellence in the mystery genre" for The Deadhouse, a New York Times bestseller, she is also the author of Final Jeopardy (an ABC Movie of the Week starring Dana Delaney), Likely to Die, and Cold Hit, all international bestsellers. Her nonfiction book Sexual Violence was a New York Times notable book in 1994. She lives with her husband in Manhattan and on Martha's Vineyard. Visit Linda Fairstein's Web site at www.lindafairstein.com

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743223543
• ISBN 13: 9780743223546
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 386