Publisher Description
Alexandra Cooper has a tough case to prosecute. Brendan Quillan, a wealthy businessman from the Upper East Side, has been charged with hiring an assassin to kill his wife, but the evidence is flimsy and the defendant has one of the most successful defence lawyers on his side. Then an explosion kills Quillan's brother, one of the construction workers in a tunnel being built to secure Manhattan's water supply. The blast isn't a terrorist act, nor is it an accident, but it looks as though Duke Quillan was the target. And none of the team investigating the murder had come across any hint that Brendan had a brother, never mind one so far on the other side of the tracks. With another case to solve, Alex, together with Detectives Chapman and Mercer, discover that Quillan's upbringing is very different from what they'd first assumed, and in the cupboard of his estranged family there are many skeletons, not all of them metaphorical. In a cliff-hanging whodunnit, Linda Fairstein takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through New York and deep beneath its streets, to a conclusion which is as surprising as it is frightening.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the exciting ninth Alexandra Cooper legal thriller from bestseller Fairstein (after Death Dance), the Manhattan prosecutor is confronted with the trial lawyer's greatest fear a witness who's destroyed on the stand. When the defense attorney shows that Kate Meade, the lead witness in Cooper's circumstantial case against Brendan Quillian for the murder of his wife, Amanda, has concealed her affair with the defendant, this revelation of Meade's potential bias has a devastating effect on the prosecution's case. As Cooper struggles to recover, the case takes a whole new twist when a fatal explosion in New York City's third water tunnel, which is under construction, suggests that Amanda's death is connected with other violent acts in the Quillian family's past. While Cooper may engage in a few too many action sequences for legal purists, the crisp writing and Fairstein's enviable capacity to translate her own experience as a prosecutor into an accessible plot puts this series a cut above most entries in this crowded subgenre.
