THE KILLS

Linda Fairstein

Little Brown £12.99 hbk Rel: Jan 2004

Reviewed by Gwen Moffat

Starting a big crime novel with the main character (Assistant DA Alexandra Cooper) prosecuting a white supremacist for rape has to be the signal for an escalation in violence. And if we're wary of the alleged victim's motives we are engaged immediately by the concurrent abuse of the defendant's ten-year-old son.

And then, as the preliminary hearing gets under way, Alex is presented with another crime: the rape and murder of a disabled octogenarian. Along with her highly efficient team of detectives, the ADA is forced to commute between the courtroom and the sleazy tenement that is the scene of the second crime.

Puzzled, nagged by a sense of déjà vu, the reader is distracted. Is this another police procedural emulating reality only too well: the law and cops chasing discrete crimes? Actually, no. delicately, insidiously, connections materalize and they in turn lead back to events over half a century ago when Farouk was the last king of Egypt and had taken as his mistress an exotic black dancer from New York.

Farouk was a collector: of rare coins, erotic art, pornography. In peace time (such as it was), and during the Second World War, he was surrounded by intrigue, by spies from Britain and the United States, and by nationalists who would overthrow him and send him into exile in Rome with a fortune in jewels and coins. It was the fate of some of this booty which was to lead to the murder of an old woman in Manhattan and to a weapons freak terrorizing his small son decades later.

The unravelling of a series of plots and red herrings in enthralling and ends in traditional fashion with a feisty Alex fighting for her life with the villain, a struggle involving heavy-duty flesh hooks in a boat off the Kills, the muddy creeks beyond the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour. Fairstein knows her material and one has the feeling that the only research needed was into Farouk and his times. For the rest she knew bent lawyers and CIA agents, she has met every kind of cop and is intimate with police procedure. She loves New York, little island-hopping planes and inshore waters, and her account of being stranded in an old farmhouse during a hurrican sweeping Martha's Vineyard is as impressive as any violence in the book. An exciting read.