Way More Setting than Plot... More Travelogue than Mystery
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Author: Linda Fairstein Title: The Bone Vault Genre: legal
I happen to be a trivia buff - one long-ago co-worker called me "a walking compendium of little-known and little-cared-for information." Perhaps it's less that I like those little tidbits of knowledge than I happen to remember darned near everything I hear or read, as long as it's of no use to me. So it stands to reason that a mystery series including within its pages little trivia nuggets would strike my fancy - and it did. Beginning with Final Jeopardy, each episode of Linda Fairstein's Alexandra Cooper series has buried within it four or five final Jeopardy answers as posed by an imaginary Alex Trebek.
The latest in the series - The Bone Vault - has the usual complement of "answers," one of which (for once) I actually knew this time around (for some odd reason, they're almost always military history, a subject on which I know little). But, unfortunately, the book has little else going for it. This time out, Fairstein borrowed conceptually from Margaret Truman's forgettable DC-based series, Murder at... to write a New York version she might as well have titled Murder at the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She should have skipped it.
MoMA, Manhattan [credit to Arad]
Old Coffin, New Body
When the body of an entry-level museum drudge is found inside a 3000-year-old sarcophagus, NYC ADA Alexandra Cooper is on the case in a flash. Never mind that her beat is sex crimes, she wants this murder. Katrina Grooten, the body's former inhabitant, had left her job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art six months earlier and disappeared to wherever it is that grad-school interns go. Only now she's turned up dead of arsenic poisoning, her body swapped with that of a long-dead Egyptian princess.
Cooper and her chums, homicide dick Mike Chapman and SVU detective Mercer Wallace, descend upon the Met and its neighbor, the American Museum of Natural History, like a three-bug swarm of locusts, lurking in darkened hallways and poking through musty basement on dusty attic in their search for Katrina's killer. It's a tough case, though, since there is precious little evidence and no apparent motive.
There's no shortage of suspects, though: could the killer be the director of the Met, whose surprise resignation followed closely on the discovery of the body? Might it be his frostily overprotective administrative assistant? Or does our trio need to shift focus to the MNH, where Grooten had been working on a joint project? When a cryptic email to Katrina from a mysterious Clem mentions her search for a "bone vault," the plot thickens. Or, that is, it should have thickened, but it remains as watery as stone soup. Perhaps it needs a little flour?
A Certain Lack of Focus
Previous work by Fairstein has been fun and fairly well plotted. The Alex Cooper character has always been somewhat cloying and annoying, as has her relationship with Chapman, but the plots have been above average. With this novel, however, the location-driven plot falls flat. Fairstein expends so much creative energy on her setting that she seems to have little left over for the plot, and it shows. Of course the eventual revelation of the murderer does not violate the prime tenet of mystery writing - you have to at least introduce the killer at some point - and naturally the real killer is not one of the early suspects. Early leads are always red herrings, after all. But when the killer's identity is finally revealed, it comes as a complete surprise. It's not a good surprise, though, in the sense of crafty plotting; but instead because the killer lacked apparent motive, opportunity, or means. All those pieces come together in a rush after identification, and the motive that Fairstein cobbled together is too weak for the weight of this corpulent plot.
At the same time, early plot threads developed solely as misdirection are left dangling. This too frequently distracts from the plot instead of augmenting the suspense.
On Fairstein
In this, her fifth Alex Cooper book (Cold Hit, Likely to Die, The Deadroom), Fairstein continues with the character she based on her own career as lead sex crimes prosecutor in Manhattan. Her name hit the news not long ago, when DNA evidence overturned her department's convictions in the "Central Park Jogger" rape case - perhaps one reason why she's a former prosecutor (she retired in 2002).
This time Fairstein has a couple of drums to beat, and they're not about work. Sure, there are a couple of "sidebar" rape cases plus references to kiddie porn and child molestation, but Cooper spends all her time on the murder case. Instead of sex crimes, there's the obligatory chapter of grief and horror over September 11, and a labyrinthine plot that eventually revolves around repatriation of aboriginal remains to their homelands. Fairstein obviously did some research; would that she had shoehorned it into the plot in a less obtrusive manner.
Overall
Though previous Cooper mysteries are enough to get a reader interested, this one's a pass. The murder plot is inaccessible and the setting's overly obtrusive. Cut-and-paste politics and sentiment are pure distraction, and I lost track of how many times Fairstein reminded us that cell phone signals couldn't penetrate to the museums' basements. Finally, why she found it necessary to drag the architecture of not only two huge museums into her setting (and the nearby "cloisters" as well) is a bigger mystery than the murder itself. Skip it.