Entombed by Linda Fairstein (Scribner, $26.00)Fairstein once again mixes her potent cocktail of crime and history, this time following the trail of Edgar Allan Poe in New York City. Faistein should really be given the key to the city. As a prosecutor, her exceptional work in trying cases was often the stuff of headlines. As a writer, she has carved out a franchise in the over-crowded mystery genre combining the city's oft-ignored history in each of her procedurals. more
Infused with the authenticity of her experience as a prosecutor, Fairstein's books offer a unique and infatuating perspective on the city.
New York prosecutor Alexandra Cooper is in the midst of investigating a brutal rape when a human skeleton is discovered walled in the basement of a brownstone owned by the NYU School of Law.The investigation into the skeleton's identity and the circumstances of the death start from an unlikely source: 19th century writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe, who lived in the house being demolished by the law school, and had a definite uh, thing about being buried alive. Both investigations move forward at a breakneck pace as Cooper and her partners in law and order Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace follow the Poe trail from the brownstone where he lived up to the Bronx where he moved to what is now Poe Cottage and the Bronx Botanical Gardens, where he lived and wandered while his young wife wasted away from an illness, and where an unknown group called The Raven Society keeps its documents. As the skeleton's identity is confirmed, Poeian themes of revenge and retribution from permeate the death, although the victim was no scholar. Interveaving suspense with her trademark historical background, fans of Poe will find this Cooper adventure to be a tour de force, full of the same themes in Poe's stories.Meanwhile, as they zero in on the identity of the rapist, who is determined to be a serial attacker from the past, Cooper and Chapman pull off the screamingly fantastic apprehension of the suspect just in the nick of time.
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