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New York is the home of more world class museums than any other city in the world and in her newest book, Linda Fairstein takes advantage of two of the oldest institutions, the white Beaux Arts building housing the Metropolitan Museum of Art with its off-campus branch dedicated to medieval art, The Cloisters, and the Richardson Romanesque granite American Museum of Natural History on opposite sides of Central Park. Assistant DA Alexandra Cooper is attending a reception for the first cooperative show between the two 10,000 pound gorillas of museums, at the Met's Temple of Dendur, when the director asks her to help. The joint show means that many items from the collections have to be shifted around, some even shipped out to foreign museums in exchange for some of their treasures. A body has been found inside a sarcophagus on the docks. Not the Egyptian princess who should have been inside, but the body of a perfectly preserved modern young woman, who is later found to have been a scholar working at The Cloisters, and who is thought to have returned to her native South Africa several months earlier. Fairstein uses the murder to take us on a tour of both museums, their secrets and their architectural oddities. When Coop and her friends take a girls only weekend at the Cape, Alex uses the respite to give an eyewitness description of the death of the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the feelings of the public safety workers involved in the rescue attempts. Other cases still come into Cooper's Sex Crimes Unit and Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, her NYPD favorite detectives, occasionally go off to help work on them, and Alex's stalker is loose again, but the main case is that of the corpse in the mummy case. This is not a classical mystery although all the clues are there in the right places. It's a 21st century look at 19th century collecting methods, but it is also a story that could have taken place in no other city in the world, since no other city has the particular combination of museums and curatorial jealousies that exist in New York City. This book continues the combination of mystery and history Fairstein brought to The Deadhouse and with superb effect. Even the cover, an image of The Cloisters at night, adds to the effect.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, October 2002
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