Terminal City

April 28, 2014
The area of Midtown Manhattan around Grand Central Terminal, with its host of landmark buildings, serves as the backdrop for bestseller Fairstein’s gripping 16th novel featuring ADA Alexandra “Coop” Cooper (after 2013’s Death Angel). An unidentified young woman lies dead in a luxury suite on a high floor of the Waldorf Astoria hotel, with “lines that appeared to have been sliced by a sharp instrument into her upper thighs.” With the U.S. president scheduled to arrive at the Waldorf in just a few days, Coop teams with Special Victim Unit detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, the highest-ranking African-American in the squad, in a race against the clock to track down the deranged individual responsible for this and subsequent brutal murders with the same m.o. Meanwhile, a complicated and evolving romance between Mike and Coop muddles the pursuit, as the detective’s shady recent past puts Coop on edge. The tour of Midtown, both above and below ground, is alone worth the price of admission. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

June 1, 2014
Why would a madman deposit a series of corpses in the neighborhood around Grand Central Station? To prepare New York City's second most popular tourist attraction for the Fairstein treatment.Whoever killed Red Cross worker Corinne Thatcher meant business-railroad business. Why else would he have stolen a trunk from the Yale Club in order to pack her up, bring her to a room on the 45th floor of the Waldorf Astoria, strip her, rape her, stab her to death and carve an elaborate series of railroad tracks into her body? Alexandra Cooper, who heads the Special Victims Unit of the District Attorney's office, is on hand to shudder at the crime scene. Even though she'd just as soon be prosecuting suspended cop Gerardo Dominguez for threatening to kill and eat his terrified wife, Alba, Coop is pulled off that case and plopped down in the middle of this one, with orders to wrap it up over the weekend before the president arrives at the Waldorf for an emergency meeting of the United Nations. The most promising suspect-Corinne's violent boyfriend, Paco, who's carried a grudge against the president ever since his brother lost both his legs to a bomber in Afghanistan-promptly hightails it back to the Dominican Republic, leaving Coop with nothing but the promise of more similarly disfigured victims killed in and around Grand Central and more conversations laden with background information about the terminal, the real estate it sits on and the network of tunnels beneath it.From the violated landmark to the return of all the regulars to the acrobatic chase finale to the casual logic behind both crime and detection, the results are so formulaic you'd swear this installment consisted entirely of outtakes from Coop's first 15 cases (Death Angel, 2013, etc.).

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May 15, 2014
Assistant DA Alex Cooper and Detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace are called to investigate when the naked body of a young woman is found in the tower suite of the prestigious Waldorf Astoria. Within days, a second body turns up bearing the same bloody symboltrain tracks carved into the skin. The focus shifts to Grand Central Terminal, where the president is scheduled to arrive for a UN meeting later in the week and where they suspect the killer is hiding out. Coop and her sidekicks struggle to get a grip on the layout of the vast terminal, from its aqua-colored celestial ceiling to the levels far beneath the ground, which are home to some 600 people, some of whom have carved apartments out of the concrete walls. As always, the crimes are graphic while the banter between the threesome adds some comic relief, but the real star of the series is Manhattan itself. Fairstein describes both the train station and some of Manhattan's iconic eateries in loving detail, giving readers a glimpse of NYC's glamour as well as its dark side. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The sixteenth entry in the Alexandra Cooper mystery series, penned by the former chief of the Manhattan Sex Crimes Unit, is sure to follow its predecessors onto the best-seller lists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)