Entombed
By Linda Fairstain
(Scribner, 2005 — 397 pages)
Reviewed by Ina R. Bort
From the New York County Lawyers' Newsletter
May 2005
You'll never look at a Metrocard the same way again after reading Linda Fairstein's latest thriller, Entombed. It turns out that a Metrocard is not just a ticket to New York City's public transportation system. It is a tracking device of your every move, assuming Fairstein's narrator is to be believed. Every Metrocard records the date and location of purchase, and every subway station and bus stop where it has been used.
As you might imagine, this information can be extremely helpful in the course of a criminal investigation. Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper, and detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, use data obtained from one Metrocard to zero in on one of the criminals they're pursuing in Entombed: the elusive Silk Stocking Rapist, who has managed to evade them for over four years. (If you are a criminal or intend to be one, stick to taxis).
The Metrocard example is not only interesting in its own right, it highlights Fairstein's greatest strength: her ability to depict New York's details — geographic, historic, cultural — in a whole new light, in a way that will surprise even those readers who have lived here for years. Her novels reflect her love for, and intimate knowledge with, this city.
In Cold Hit, for instance, Fairstein's focus was on the Chelsea art gallery scene. In The Deadhouse, she turned her attentions to Roosevelt Island. This time, it's the New York City of Edgar Allan Poe, stretching from his home at 85 West 3rd Street in the West Village to the grounds of the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx.
The story begins with the latest crime by the Silk Stocking Rapist. As is his wont, he has assaulted and raped a young woman on Manhattan's Upper East Side in her own apartment. And as usual, he's been able to accomplish his insidious goal by binding his victim's hands with a pair of pantyhose.
Alexandra Cooper, the heroine of Fairstein's novels, is assigned to the case, having pursued this criminal for years. Cooper is, in many ways, Fairstein's alter ego: head of the sex crimes unit of the Manhattan D.A.'s office, just as Fairstein was for many years. Cooper's sidekicks, Wallace and Chapman, will also be familiar to readers of Fairstein's other novels.
It's easier to collect evidence about the rape suspect this time around than it was four years ago, when the Silk Stocking Rapist last struck, given improved forensic technology in the realm of DNA samples and the development of a well-organized national data base of suspects' genetic information. In an interesting scene, Cooper is able to obtain an indictment based upon the suspect's DNA alone, even though she is unable to present any other identifying information about him to the grand jury, aside from the testimony of his previous victims.
The plot thickens when another Upper East Side woman, Emily Upshaw, is found murdered in her apartment. Once again, the tell tale signs of the Silk Stocking Rapist are there: she lives in his target neighborhood, for one, and her hands are bound by stockings. But the Silk Stocking Rapist has never before murdered a victim, and this time the victim's hands are bound with real silk stockings, not ordinary pantyhose. Is Emily's murderer the Silk Stocking Rapist, or is another cold blooded criminal wreaking havoc on the Upper East Side as well?
Coincidentally, Alexandra becomes an eyewitness to something that will eventually lead her to the answer to this question. In what is, hands down, the most interesting Continuing Legal Education class to have ever taken place, Alexandra heads to NYU Law School where she thinks she's about to listen to one of those interminable panel discussions. Before the class begins, a reception is held in a 200-plus year-old brownstone, Poe's former home, located around the corner from the law school's main building, which NYU is about to demolish and renovate into a new law school annex (you'll likely remember the real life battle over this property that took place between NYU and historic preservationists). In the brownstone's basement, the dean is showing CLE participants (a/k/a potential donors) the excavation in process. Alexandra heads downstairs for a glimpse. Of course, moments after her arrival, another guest lets out a shrill scream: the excavators have uncovered a full human skeleton, entombed behind a brick wall.
Alexandra is immediately intrigued, and cannot get this skeleton out of her mind, particularly once she learns that the victim had been buried alive behind the brick wall. How fitting that this gruesome crime had occurred at 85 West 3rd Street, given that this was Poe's greatest fear, and the subject of so many of his short stories, including "The Cask of Amontillado," which he is said to have written in that very house. Alexandra, who happens to be very fond of and knowledgeable about Poe's poetry and prose (excerpts of which are interspersed among the pages of Entombed), cannot resist the temptation of unraveling the mystery of the West 3rd Street corpse even as she continues her hunt for the Silk Stocking Rapist and the murderer of Emily Upshaw.
This triple workload translates into some very late nights for Alexandra Cooper, and into some rather unfocused writing on Fairstein's part. The Poe-driven side of Entombed — which leads Alexandra to an odd secret society of Poe aficionados known as the Raven Society, and to a small home in the Bronx, in what is now known as Poe Park, where Poe also lived for a time with his beloved bride – is actually absorbing and affords Fairstein the ability to flaunt her knowledge of Poe and his connections to New York and, in an entertaining way, to cast some of the city's most familiar, benign landmarks, like the Botanical Gardens (where Poe used to stroll), in the most sinister possible light. This material alone would have been more than sufficient fodder for a murder mystery, and the Silk Stocking Rapist angle ends up being little more than a distraction. In fact, after the opening scenes, that entire line of the plot is all but ignored until the last quarter of the novel, when a wholly incredible and seemingly thrown-together series of events enable Cooper and her team to discover the rapist's identity. Fairstein would have been better off omitting this entire sub-plot.
The Alexandra Cooper novels have made Fairstein a national best selling author. Entombed, which features many of the same elements of those previous works, will undoubtedly appeal to her fans. They will welcome the return of Detectives Chapman and Wallace and enjoy watching how Cooper, with their help, pieces together the myriad clues they accumulate along the way, and watching Cooper escape from the near-death chase scene that routinely appears in the last chapter. Some may think that Fairstein is starting to become formulaic, but as it appears to be a formula that translates into high sales, there's little chance that it will change.
