"Intriguing sex crimes thriller"

Manhattan District Attorney's Office Sex Crimes Chief Prosecutor Alexandra "Alex" Cooper and NYPD Special Victims Squad police detectives Mercer Wallace and Mike Chapman believe they finally have a break in the Silk Stocking rape murder cases. The apparent latest victim Annika Jelt still lived thanks to a cop providing emergency first aid. The case has gone nowhere for several years, but with a potential eye witness and semen enabling DNA testing, hopes rise until the law enforcement officials conclude that a copycat killer is more likely on the prowl.

As Alex, with pressure from her boss works the serial rapist-killer case, NYU begins renovating the area surrounding the school. At an NYU law school gala workers tear down a wall in a townhouse where Edgar Allan Poe once resided and the remains of a woman is uncovered. Forensics concludes that the woman was walled in alive back in the late 1970s. As clues surface that begin to link her cases, Alex turns to the Raven Society for assistance fearing that one of its scholars might prove to be the one behind the nevermore rape homicides.

Linda Fairstein's latest sex crimes thriller is an intriguing New York romp as Alex and her cohorts travel the city hitting popular and not so known Poe locations in an effort to uncover the killer(s). The story line is action-packed, as the heroine and her two detectives know that they race against time to prevent another rape- homicide from happening. Alex remains a strong central figure to admire who holds the tale together, but the plot hums because using Poe provides a freshness to this strong combo legal thriller-police procedural urban series (see THE DEAD-HOUSE, FINAL JEOPARDY, and THE KILLS, etc.).

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted December 20, 2004

Summary

From New York Times bestselling author and famed former Manhattan prosecutor Linda Fairstein comes a chilling new Alexandra Cooper novel, Entombed, in which Alex matches wits with the master of detective fiction himself-Edgar Allan Poe... Workers demolishing a nineteenth-century brownstone where Edgar Allan Poe once lived discover a human skeleton entombed -- standing -- behind a brick wall. When sex crimes prosecutor Alexandra Cooper hears about the case, it strikes her as a classic Poe scene...except that forensic evidence shows that this young woman died within the last twenty-five years. Meanwhile, Alex's old nemesis the Silk Stocking Rapist is once again terrorizing Manhattan's Upper East Side. The attacks soon escalate to murder, and the search leads Alex and detectives Mercer Wallace and Mike Chapman to the city's stunning Bronx Botanical Gardens. There, an enigmatic librarian presides over the Raven Society, a group devoted to the work of Poe. In exploring the fabled writer's tormented life for clues, Alex will cross paths with a cunning killer and face some of the greatest challenges of her career. Entombed is masterful, exhilarating crime fiction from one of crime writing's most dazzling stars.