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Alexandra Cooper, Assistant DA in New York City, advised Lola Dakota to bring charges against her abusive husband, but Professor Dakota preferred to have the New Jersey district attorney stage her murder and trace the hit back to Ivan. After the staged murder, Lola returns to her apartment in New York City where, a few hours later, she is found dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft. The death is called an accident, but Alex and Detective Mike Chapman don¼t think it is, a belief later upheld by the medical examiner, who determines that she had been strangled. A search of her apartment turns up notes about „The Deadhouse¾ and 2 shoe boxes full of cash. Ivan was in jail in New Jersey at the time of her murder, so Alex and Mike go to King¼s College, the experimental offshoot of Columbia University to check out her office and try and figure out who else would have a reason to kill the highly competent but extremely dislikable professor Lola. Her office yields few clues...a picture of a student who had disappeared several months before is pinned to a bulletin board and a wad of gum is found in the wastebasket, but the DA and the detective set up interviews with her associates at King¼s. Since most of New York City is covered by concrete, it is difficult to do any meaningful urban archeology. Dakota and her colleagues, Thomas Grenier, biologist, Winston Shreve and Nan Rothschild, anthropologists, and Skip Lockhart, an American history scholar, and their students were each interested in a different facet of the history of Blackwell¼s Island, a two mile long island in the middle of the East river, which was the site of a prison built in 1832, a „Lunatic Asylum¾ built in 1839, a Smallpox hospital, designed by James Renwick, (a Columbia graduate) who also designed the Smithsonian Castle in Washington and Grace Church in New York, a Lighthouse also designed by Renwick, built in 1872, and an 1892 building known as the Strecker Laboratory, which was actually a morgue and pathology lab. Cooper and Chapman, and Chapman¼s partner, Mercer Wallace, who is recovering from gunshot wounds, work at solving this murder, while working on other cases. All the characters are well rounded. The mystery is satisfactory, and New York is very definitely a part of the book, just as Rankin¼s Edinburgh is part of his work.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, December 2001
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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