Book Blurb: Lethal Legacy

This book was just delivered to me at my Mom's house today and will be the next novel I pick up after I finish Harriette Simpson Arnow's The Weedkiller's Daughter.

Read the rest of the story of the book's adventures on its way to me below.

And be sure to watch the video of Linda Fairstein touring the rooms of the New York Public Library--the setting of this novel. Awesome.

Lethal Legacy (Alexandra Cooper Novel)
by Linda Fairstein
(c) 2009
Pub. Doubleday
384p

genre: suspense/thriller; mystery; detective

In Linda Fairstein’s outstanding new novel, the New York Public Library houses dazzling treasures—and deadly secrets.

When Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper is summoned to Tina Barr’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she finds a neighbor convinced that the young woman was assaulted. But the terrified victim, a conservator of rare books and maps, refuses to cooperate with investigators. Then another woman is found murdered in that same apartment with an extremely valuable book, believed to have been stolen. As Alex pursues the murderer, she is drawn into the strange and privileged world of the Hunt family, major benefactors of the New York Public Library and passionate rare book collectors.

Eventually Alex connects their internal family rivalries to a priceless edition of Alice in Wonderland, which also contains the world’s oldest map. Would one of the well-bred Hunts be willing to kill for the treasures? The search for the answer takes Alex and her team on a breathtaking chase from Manhattan’s grandest apartments to the secret tunnels and chambers of the New York Public Library, and finally to a nineteenth-century underground vault. There, in the pitch-black darkness, Alex comes face-to-face with the killer who values money more than life.

Featuring a cast of elite, erudite, and downright eccentric characters, and a complex trail of clues that will have you guessing until the final pages, Lethal Legacy is Linda Fairstein’s most beguiling thriller yet.

Reader's Guide

Read an Excerpt

In this video, Linda Fairstein takes us on a tour of the New York Public Library, focusing on the rooms where major scenes in her novel are set. Included are glimpses of the rooms where the conservators work on repairing and preserving old books and manuscripts with closeups of the instruments they use daily that stimulated the imagination of this murder mystery writer.



Oh, I am so drooling right now. I want to climb inside the screen and walk those marble floors. The New York Public Library is one of the places on my short list of places to see while I can still see.

www.lindafairstein.com


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Even if I wasn't eager to read this story I would need to pick it up next in spite of all the novels I brought with me to my Mom's and the novels and NF I checked out on my sister's library card just in order to justify having put my husband through the hassle of shipping it to me after he had to use his contacts inside UPS (he works on the shipping dock of a major Southern Oregon corporation) to have the package delivered to him at his folk's house. A package addressed to me with my pen name and to his folk's PO Box, which UPS and informed his folks they were holding at their Medford hub for me to pick up in person with three pieces of ID.

Which would have been hard to do even if I had been in town as I don't have any official picture ID (being legally blind I don't drive and nor am I highly motivated to wait in line at the DMZ for six hours to voluntarily say cheese for a camera. bleh.) and the only other remotely IDish things I have are my library card and my voter's registration card. And none of them use my pen name except in the sense that my pen name is my first and middle name--Joy Renee.

This totally embarrassing situation came about because I won this 'review' copy on Goodreads in late January after entering the drawing for it weeks before that along with about twenty others. I always use my pen name and PO Box online unless I have a very good reason to use my full name and physical address. I don't remember seeing anything on the Goodreads site at the time I entered all those drawings specifying that my physical address was required. I think, if I thought about it at all, that I figured that in the case of a win someone would contact me via email requesting the necessary info.

Antoher thing I was assuming when I entered all those drawings was that I would be safely back at home in Phoenix by the time the contests closed. Ha. I'm still here in Longview, Washington helping out in the care of my Mom as she recoveres from the broken hip and the minor stroke brought on by the hip surgery she incurred in late November. And it looks like I'll be here through March. I'm nurturing some hope that I can be home for Easter though I haven't even checked to see which week that falls on this year.