Cold Hit Hardcover - 1999

From the publisher

A chilling new Alexandra Cooper thriller from the acclaimed Manhattan Assistant D.A. who lives the gritty and glamorous life she writes.

The raves are in for Linda Fairstein's Alexandra Cooper novels. "Riveting authenticity," says "Vanity Fair." "Grisham-esque," says "Time." "There is an anger and a passion in Alex Cooper that is clearly not fictional," says "The London Times."

From its dramatic opening scene when a silk-clad corpse washes up from the turbulent waters at Manhattan's northern tip to its stunning conclusion when Alexandra runs for her life, "Cold Hit" transports the reader behind the scenes with the cops, the criminals, the victims, and the denizens of the art world. Here is the authenticity, the vision, that only Linda Fairstein can provide.

On a steamy August evening, after an exhausting day in the courtroom, Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper joins her longtime pals and partners-in-investigation, NYPD detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, at a somber crime scene. In her ten years as a sex crimes prosecutor, Alex has seen many victims, but few more poignant than this one, pulled from the water with her hands and feet obscenely tied to a ladder.

Sleep comes uneasily after such a vision, but the knowledge that monsters walk the city's streets, preying on the innocent, motivates Alex and her colleagues in their sometimes heartbreaking work. Perhaps this time they will be lucky. A "cold hit" could match DNA from the crime scene with a suspect's DNA profile in the police database. Or is this case a more sinister kind of "cold hit"? Who was this latest victim?

From a luxurious Fifth Avenue apartment to famous midtown auction houses to theavant-garde galleries of Chelsea, Alex, Mike, and Mercer hunt for a killer in a very special world where priceless art meets big money in a lethal mix. Whether it's a missing Rembrandt, a Vermeer in need of authentication, or doors paneled with precious amber and missing since the great Nazi art thefts, the stakes are high, the consequences potentially fatal.

Illuminating and inspiring, "Cold Hit" takes us from the paint-chipped offices of cops and D.A.s to the elegant restaurants of Alex's privileged Upper East Side life. The contrast is striking, but it's all part of the extraordinary world that author Linda Fairstein has brought so vividly to life in this magnificent novel of suspense.