Likely to Die
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4.6 • 9 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Alexandra Cooper, Manhattan's top sex crimes prosecutor, is brought into what promises to be a messy case. Gemma Dogen was found in her own office in a New York hospital sexually assaulted, soaked in her own blood and considered likely to die before she can be moved to the emergency room.
Alex combs through her files for murders with similar modus operandi, while Mike Chapman and the other detectives concentrate on possible motives amongst her friends and colleagues - many of whom had found Gemma a professional thorn in their sides.
Two facts rapidly become apparent: the hospital itself is far from secure; and someone believes that Alex has discovered something far too damaging for them to let her live...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Several notorious recent crimes perpetrated in New York City and elsewhere inform Fairstein's follow-up to last year's Final Jeopardy, foremost among them the murder and assumed rape of a prominent Manhattan physician in her hospital office. When Fairstein, who's head of the Manhattan DA's sex crimes unit, sticks to the basics of these cases and the prosecutorial and police procedures used to handle them, she writes with an authority that crime buffs will relish. But Fairstein has already chronicled the life of a sex-crimes prosecutor in her 1994 memoir, Sexual Violence. Here, she seems to be mythologizing her life and work: returning narrator Alexandra Cooper is Fairstein's apparent alter ego (from job to personality to hair color), and too often the book feels self-aggrandizing. Whatever talent at fiction Fairstein possessed she apparently drained in writing the superior Final Jeopardy. The investigation into the doctor's killing unfolds with minimal suspense. There are a few false leads, flatly presented, a couple of cliched attempts at tension--a car tries to run Cooper down; she receives a threatening note--and a villain who, when revealed, seems arbitrary. The circuitous road to justice is cluttered with story debris, including a lackadaisical side-trip to England and pedantic lecturing on criminal justice issues by both Cooper and the cops she works with, plus juvenile banter among these characters and tips on how a stylish ADA does her hair and nails. Major ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates; Mystery Guild main selection; author tour.
