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A review by weaselweader
Death Angel by Linda Fairstein
3.0
Did you forget that Alex Cooper is a lawyer?
If one were a serial rapist or a pervert inclined to sexual assault, there’s no question that night-time Central Park would be prime hunting territory. So Linda Fairstein’s DEATH ANGEL, #15 in her extraordinarily long-running and immensely successful Alexandra Cooper series, starts off like the proverbial house on fire, when a young woman is found dead in a secluded lake located in a particularly densely wooded section of the park. But that spark fails to ignite the novel into the expected inferno because of a number of problems.
First and foremost is that the plot is not particularly unique or interesting. After all, serial rapists and murderers in New York City?? Ho hum! Been there, done that! The second problem is that what should have been a barn-burning legal thriller simply wasn’t. And, by that, I mean it wasn’t even a legal thriller. Ms Fairstein seems to have completely forgotten that her protagonist, Alexandra Cooper, is not a police detective. She’s a lawyer, for goodness’ sake. As a prosecutor, an assistant district attorney and the head honcho in New York’s sex crimes unit, you’d think that every once in a while she ought to get involved with legal issues and the inside of a court room. Third, Ms Fairstein has chosen to clutter the plot line with problems of professional misbehavior related to who police, judges and lawyers are allowed to sleep with. Uninteresting, Ms Fairstein … just uninteresting.
On the plus side, DEATH ANGEL presents an absolutely fascinating history of Central Park and uptown Manhattan, in particular, the Dakota apartments on the upper west side and the little known community of free blacks known as Seneca Village. Although I’ve been admittedly critical of the story in DEATH ANGEL, I have to give full marks to Linda Fairstein for her ability to present an absolute ton of historical tidbits and information without disrupting the flow of the story … such as it is!
I’ve still got a couple of Alex Cooper entries on my unread bookshelf and I’ll certainly read them but I hope that my next choice returns to the legal stomping ground that I was hoping for.
Paul Weiss
If one were a serial rapist or a pervert inclined to sexual assault, there’s no question that night-time Central Park would be prime hunting territory. So Linda Fairstein’s DEATH ANGEL, #15 in her extraordinarily long-running and immensely successful Alexandra Cooper series, starts off like the proverbial house on fire, when a young woman is found dead in a secluded lake located in a particularly densely wooded section of the park. But that spark fails to ignite the novel into the expected inferno because of a number of problems.
First and foremost is that the plot is not particularly unique or interesting. After all, serial rapists and murderers in New York City?? Ho hum! Been there, done that! The second problem is that what should have been a barn-burning legal thriller simply wasn’t. And, by that, I mean it wasn’t even a legal thriller. Ms Fairstein seems to have completely forgotten that her protagonist, Alexandra Cooper, is not a police detective. She’s a lawyer, for goodness’ sake. As a prosecutor, an assistant district attorney and the head honcho in New York’s sex crimes unit, you’d think that every once in a while she ought to get involved with legal issues and the inside of a court room. Third, Ms Fairstein has chosen to clutter the plot line with problems of professional misbehavior related to who police, judges and lawyers are allowed to sleep with. Uninteresting, Ms Fairstein … just uninteresting.
On the plus side, DEATH ANGEL presents an absolutely fascinating history of Central Park and uptown Manhattan, in particular, the Dakota apartments on the upper west side and the little known community of free blacks known as Seneca Village. Although I’ve been admittedly critical of the story in DEATH ANGEL, I have to give full marks to Linda Fairstein for her ability to present an absolute ton of historical tidbits and information without disrupting the flow of the story … such as it is!
I’ve still got a couple of Alex Cooper entries on my unread bookshelf and I’ll certainly read them but I hope that my next choice returns to the legal stomping ground that I was hoping for.
Paul Weiss