I love Sandie Herron’s side note about her character in Linda Fairstein’s The Deadhouse. It’s been a while since I featured one of her book reviews. It’s time. Thank you, Sandie!
THE DEADHOUSE
Series: Alexandra Cooper, Book 4
Written By Linda Fairstein
Scribner (September 25, 2001)
Macavity Award Nominee for Best Mystery, Nero Award for excellence in the mystery genre
Taking place in that dead space between Christmas and New Year’s in a bleak and deserted city, Alexandra Cooper is the assistant district attorney in charge of the sex crimes unit in Manhattan. Her unit also covers domestic violence, which is how she meets Lola Dakota. Lola had been abused by her husband for years and finally decided to stage her own death in order to catch him in murder. Things seemingly went well with the staged scene, and Dakota escaped life in exile in New Jersey and returned to her apartment in New York City. That very same night, however, she was found dead again, this time for real, at the bottom of an elevator shaft.
Professor Lola Dakota was involved with an experimental curriculum at King’s College. She and other anthropologists were working on an excavation of Roosevelt Island, immediately next to Manhattan Island. In years gone by, the ill and infirm were sent to what was previously known as Blackwells Island in quarantine. Prisoners were sent to a penitentiary that was literally run by the mob. Each of the teachers had a different aspect of interest to bring to the project. It was now up to Alex Cooper and Detective Mike Chapman to determine what those interests were and whether they had any bearing on a murder that seemed to be based on a domestic dispute.
Fairstein has a great way of introducing history seamlessly through her characters, as if it were meant to be explained just then and by that character. No dull university lessons here. Society on Blackwells Island was brought to life by the retelling of the history of the hospital, the lab, the insane asylum, the smallpox hospital, the morgue, the prison, and the deadhouses. We even visit the present everyday life that goes on in the populated section of Roosevelt Island via an on-site trial.
Although Cooper is absorbed by this new case of Lola Dakota and how it unfolds before her, she must also take care of the less spectacular details of her job at the same time. We are treated to a birds-eye view of the prosecutor’s life in the courtroom and in her office as she leads hundreds of attorneys in her department. At times Cooper seems to handle it all with just a little too much ease and convenience, despite her routine 12-hour days, until she relayed the following to the reader: “The need to explore the lives of the people whose tragedies came our way took us to intimate places I had no more desire to enter than the deceased would have had to let me in. For me, it was impossible to do this work with a clinical remorse. … there was an emotional pull that nagged at my heart with every life that was lost.” Her driven nature to solve the crimes placed before her become clearer with this passage.
This fourth Alexandra Cooper adventure feels like a big step forward in Fairstein’s writing skill and ability to introduce details adeptly without overwhelming the reader with unnecessary minutiae. In the wrong hands, a police procedural can plod along, boring the reader through every single wrong turn and detail turned up during an investigation. This is absolutely not the case here. THE DEADHOUSE is a particularly engrossing tale of a modern-day murder mystery linked with yesterday’s intriguing past.
As a side note, I won the right to be a character in this novel at Bouchercon 29 in Philadelphia. Introduced in Chapter 19 (Page 220) ofThe Deadhouse, Alexandra Cooper has just arrived at Hospital on Roosevelt Island to conduct a hearing on site. One patient is mentally disabled and will need a staff member to interpret her speaking, and that turns out to be Sandie Herron, the physician in charge of this wing of the hospital. The doctor acts as interpreter, guide, and gets Coop and the victim through the hearing with positive results. I had always dreamed of becoming a doctor, but I was too afraid of bugs and blood. Linda Fairstein gave me the chance to pretend.
