Final Jeopardy FROM THE PUBLISHER
Manhattan's top sex crimes prosecutor opens her newspaper one day to some shocking headlines: Sex Prosecutor Slain - FBI, State Troopers Join Search for Killer. The supposed victim is Assistant D.A. Alexandra Cooper, but Alex is still very much alive. Dead, on the wooded road leading to Alex's summer home on Martha's Vineyard, is beautiful film star Isabella Lascar. Isabella had borrowed Alex's house for a secluded holiday. Now her body has been found without any identification in a car rented in Alex's name, her face disfigured beyond recognition by the shotgun blast that took her life. The local police naturally assumed she was Alex. There are two possibilities. Somebody despised Isabella enough to trace her to Alex's Vineyard retreat. Or the killer's intended victim was Alex, and Isabella was shot by mistake. If so, the assassin may try again, and the next time Alex may not escape. With longtime friend Mike Chapman from NYPD Homicide as her temporary bodyguard, Alex must probe the Sex Crimes Unit records in the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building, searching the files of closed cases, pending sex offense complaints, and lists of convicts recently paroled. Somebody in one of those records may have hated Alex enough to wish her dead. Isabella, too, had her enemies, including a stalker who wrote letters and made threatening calls. The hunt for the killer goes on, while Alex, with her characteristic intensity and humor, continues the gritty procedures of her daily life - witness and victim interviews, courtroom appearances, serial rape investigations, and late-night precinct meetings with cops and detectives.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
The crusading longtime chief of Manhattan's Sex Crimes Prosecutions Unit brings to her exciting first novel the same passion and insights into the criminal and crime-busting minds that marked her memoir, Sexual Violence (1994). Fairstein also brings herself to the novel-or at least an alter ego of a narrator, Alexandra Cooper, who's also a middle-aged blonde heading the borough's prosecution of sex offenders. Cooper's typical day of counseling victims and working with the NYPD on sex crimes would probably keep readers fascinated, but her latest problem-the shooting murder of glamorous movie star Isabella Lascar at Cooper's getaway home on Martha's Vineyard-pitches the plot at high intensity right away. Though Cooper is warned by the DA not to play cop, she and homicide detective Mike Chapman, who's assigned to bodyguard her, work together unofficially to solve the crime, carrying on a sort of anti-romance all the while. Fairstein isn't a gifted stylist-her dialogue is as wooden as a judge's gavel-and the details of Cooper's professional and personal lives drive the story forward with more vigor than the murder investigation does. Some readers will be disappointed, too, that Cooper, like any victim, has to be rescued in the end by her fiercely protective and ingenious friends on the NYPD. But then this heroine's greatest appeal lies in the warmth of her friendships, the humanness of her mistakes and her unswerving devotion to protecting the next female from harm. As a woman with grave responsibilities who still puts her pantyhose on one leg at a time, she makes a memorable debut. Literary Guild and Mystery Guild main selections; Doubleday Book Club alternate; author tour. (June)
Library Journal
Like her creator, Fairstein (Sexual Violence, LJ 9/15/93), Alexandra Cooper is New York City's assistant district attorney for sex crimes prosecution. A Hollywood actress staying at Alex's vacation home on Martha's Vineyard and driving a rental car charged to Alex's credit card is murdered. Was Alex really the intended victim and the murderer someone she had once prosecuted? Is that why she's been receiving anonymous nocturnal telephone calls? Or was the actress done in by her estranged lover? Why is Alex's own current lover, an investment banker and former Senate candidate, trying to cover up his own involvement with the actress? This thriller, which will keep readers asking questions and turning pages, has the potential to be one of the summer's big hits. Recommended for popular collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/96.]-Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Kirkus Reviews
Like her creator, Alexandra Cooper is the New York Assistant District Attorney in charge of prosecuting sex crimes. Day in, day out, she toils in the sewers of the Criminal Courts Building, bent on nailing the nastiest perps in the system. In spite of her glamorpuss investment-banker boyfriend, Jed Segal, it seems her life couldn't get any grimmer—until the day she reads her own obituary in the papers and realizes that Isabella Lascar, the actress friend who's borrowed her place on Martha's Vineyard, has been killed—maybe in mistake for Alex herself. Worse still, a good close look at the evidence tells Alex that despite his fervent denials, Jed was with Iz on the Vineyard. Did he end their fling by shooting her—or was the killer the stalker who'd dogged Iz in Hollywood, or her ex, small-time producer (and big- time cokehead) Richard Burrell, or her latest pre-Jed lover, brain-dead stuntman Johnny Garelli, or Cordelia Jeffers, the mysterious Royal Academy Fellow who wrote Iz a bizarre letter, part advice, part warning—and who now seems to be turning her attention to Alex? First-novelist Fairstein (Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape, 1993) isn't much of a stylist, but when the story flags, she's got a million anecdotes about the Con Ed rapist and the fondling mail carrier.
Patricia Cornwell in the Big Apple. Alex insists she doesn't see every man as a potential rapist, but after reading this, you wonder why not.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
"From the mind of one who knows, this is life. Raw, real, and new. Linda Fairstein is wonderful." — Patricia Cornwell
"This is no I-guess-this-must-be-what-it's-like fantasy of how the criminal system operates. Final Jeopardy is a smart and gutsy insiders who done it. But the novel than authenticity going for it. It's got a terrific protagonist: Alexandra Cooper is a tough, dedicated assistant attorney and a warm-hearted, funny and insightfull dame. Linda Fairstein has done one hell of a job." — Susan Isaacs
"Linda Fairstein's two decades as a prosecutor of sex crimes infuses Final Jeopardy with riveting authenticity." — Elissa Schappell
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