Customer Reviews

Entombed : A Novel

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I confess I'm a great fan of the Alex Cooper series because Fairstein, a former prosecutor, combines her vast knowledge of the criminal justice system with appealing characters, great plots, and a breezy, fast-paced style. In this book she outdoes herself. She reveals a hidden story about Edgar Allen Poe and gives us a glimpse into one of the great New York landmarks -- also a Fairstein specialty. It's fun, informative and truly frightening, worthy of the master to whom it pays homage. Be prepared to stay up all night.

Unlike the last few in Fairstein's Alexandra Cooper series, this one really held my interest, as the plot is wound around the tales of Edgar Allen Poe.

When a decades-old skeleton is found entombed behind a brick wall in a home where Poe once lived, and it is ascertained that the corpse was buried alive, Poe's tales become all too real. Alex, Mercer and Chapman are quickly caught up in this very cold case that becomes hotter by the second as they uncover a mysterious Poe society, all of whose members could have been invented by the master himself.

Entwined with that interesting mystery is another case Alex has on her plate: the return of the so-called "Silk-Stocking Rapist," who terrorized women on the East Side of New York, and then mysteriously disappeared without ever having been caught. Now, it seems, he is back, and Alex, head of the DA's Sex Crimes Unit, is desperate to catch him.

I truly enjoyed this book and am glad that Fairstein seems back on track like she was in her early works. Recommended.

Fairstein's epistle gives the reader a lot of information to chew on and digest. First, we have the return of a rapist who has been strangely silent for the past four years, as well as a series of seemingly unconnected murders. When workmen demolishing a 19th century brownstone that was once the home of Edgar Allan Poe discover the body of a woman buried upright behind a brick wall it appears that "life is imitating art" and someone has taken a page out of a Poe novel.

Utilizing the search for the dual criminals as the "background" for the story, Fairstein takes us on a tour of the Bronx. She gives us an up close and personal look at the Botanical Gardens which contains 50 acres of forest, the waterfalls of the Bronx River Gorge, a "crystal palace" conservatory containing 17,000 glass panes, and the first Hall of Fame in America (an outdoor vista containing 98 bronze busts of Great Americans ranging from poets, to jurists, to soldiers).
And I thought Central Park was the only touch of green in NYC.

The garden, she tells us, was once owned by P. Lorillard, tobacco scion, and contains an old snuff mill as well as Poe cottage, where Poe lived with his wife/cousin until her death. (And now you have the "connector" between the Bronx Botanical Tour and the murderer who feels a kinship with Poe and commits his crimes according to macabre Poe plots).

Fairstein fleshes out her rather thin plot with loads of in depth facts and observations about everything from Fordham University to the Gould Library. All of the "facts" that liberally pepper the book could serve as the basis for a plethora of Jeopardy final questions (a game that her alter ego, Alex Cooper, and friends Mike and Mercer are rather fond of playing).

Emtombed is more a guided tour of the Bronx and a look at Poe's sad existance than the murder mystery with gothic overtones I'm sure it was meant to be.

This book wasn't as good as the others. The Edgar Allan Poe parts were interesting but that's not why I bought the book. I bought it because of the way Ms. Fairstein puts together mysteries and her leads solve them. I loved how she usually has them interact both professionally and personally. But in this book it felt stilted and forced. I felt she had so many mysteries going on at once that she had to tie together that she didn't really do any of them justice. I was just disappointed in this book. Granted I haven't read all her books but the ones I have read are better than this. This one was jumbled up and wasn't logical. Alex Cooper has usually held her own but in this book, it was like she was a bumbling idiot. Just sad for this strong, smart character. I hope the series get better than this. Can't wait to give another a try.

I should be spending time working on my dissertation (which I have grown to hate). But when I'm having problems with my neuropathy/MS or whatever it is, I find it hard to concentrate on watching sign language interpreters do science, especially if it is done badly.

Anyway, I've always liked Fairstein's books, and this has been an enjoyable read because of her involvement of Poe in the story line.I read Edgar Allan Poe when I was a teenager (guys, don't read at night!) and he remains the writer who others like Stephen King try to emulate in their horror stories, but never quite make it. As Fairstein discloses in her book, Poe's real life was the horror from which a child's and adolescent's mind drew his plots from. He didn't have to reach far. The death of his parents, separation from his siblings, his relunctant foster care by the Allan's, his marriage to his young cousin and her subsequent death...all of this was fodder for a sensitive soul whose writing was recognized as genius.

In this case, the closely knit trio of Alex, Mercer, and Mike find themselves dealing with an entombed body discovered in the remains of a house Poe lived in temporarily. But the body and the means of entombing her were more recent, and they get to deal with fans of Poe who took things a bit to the extreme. The egos of writers, of critics, and academia are all too fitting for this story.

The relationship between the three main characters is one of the best things about Fairsteen's books. The witty repartee between all of them and the hilarious game they play with the last question of Jeapordy is loads of fun, especially when you try to guess the answer yourself. I think Alex Trebek should be very flattered (and the show itself) that he is included in these stories.

There is a part which I won't give away, that is absolutely heart-wrenching for the three friends to deal with, and you wonder if the author will allow them to continue after this happening (or continue in the normal friendship they usually have). I quess this will have to wait until the next book...

Karen Sadler

Fairstein's latest book is so basic that I had to double check to make sure it wasn't her debut book that they now decided to release.

Although the basic premise might have been interesting (a dead body found in Poe's house), you find out very quickly that this has nothing to do with Poe. I believe this book would certainly have been far better had she decided to include him.

While this book is not horrible, its just more of the same that Fairstein has been turning out. Absolutely nothing new here and the story just is not that interesting. Its as though she does not know what to write anymore so she keeps using bits and pieces of her other stories.

Or maybe I am just tired of reading the works of major authors and having the feeling they just "called it in".

Lately, I have been enjoying unknowns alot more than our "bestseller" authors.

Overall, I found this an entertaining read. Unlike a previous reviewer, I enjoyed the Poe references. But like a previous reviewer, I did find it amazing how the supposedly smart heroine got herself into so many really stupid situations.

And there were two really stupid errors in the book. First, there are no bats with 4 foot wing spans in New York. Or anywhere in the US, for that matter. Second, people who drown in fresh water do NOT have water in their lungs. The fresh water is sucked into the blood through the lungs by the great osmotic pressure differential between the very salty blood and the non-salty fresh water. Thus, inexperienced pathologists are often confused when a body of someone who drowned in fresh water is found to have no water in the lungs.

As many other reviewers this is my first Linda Fairstein mystery. To start on the positive the description of the Bronx expecially the Botanical Gardens and Poe Park were interesting. I also learned a great deal about Poe. ( Poe seems in vogue with a new book by Matthew Pearl on Poe)

The characters seem to busy being clever to be interesting. Chapman's romance may be more meaningful to readers who know the series but all I thought it did was show they were deep and did not add to the story.

On the whole it is a diverting book but there are many better series.

First, this is my first book by Linda Fairstein. Maybe, if I had read the eariler ones, I may have had a better insight on the characters. As it was when Mike Chapman received a devasting blow, it lacked any pull. I also found the relationship between Alex, Mike and Mercer hard to understand. They are suppose to be close yet they really don't spend time together outside of work unless it's eating at really odd times.

The story line less the personal drama of Mike Chapman is very interesting. Interesting facts about Poe and New York add zest to the book.

Overall, a good summer beach read.

I'm always leery of genre books written by authors who come from the same professional world of which they are writing. Too often I've found them top-heavy with jargon and shows of professional scholarship, and light on writing style and substance. This book is a prime example.

At the beginning, we're told of a rape victim who was left for dead, and while being transported to the ER was revived by a police officer, "in the backseat of the RMP." What's an RMP? I don't know; Google tells me it's either a Risk Management Plan or a Revised Management Procedure, neither of which, I figure, come equipped with backseats. Yet, while the author is content to assume everyone will understand her reference to an RMP, she feels compelled to have a character explain an anatomical feature that anyone past their mid-teens knows. And this to an NYPD detective (who had been making masculine references to a skeleton):

Forensic Anthropologist (examining skeleton): "The hips on this one give her away."

You know what the giveaway is, don't you? Well, the detective doesn't.

Detective: "Why's that?"

And the FA goes on to explain about women's child-bearing hips.

After a scene in which we are told of a skeleton found the previous year (ca. 2003), and for which time of death was placed at "no earlier than 1966," because of a dime that was found alongside the bones, it is discovered that the skeleton they have just unearthed in a 200-year-old brownstone is not centuries old, as everyone had been speculating, but no more than 25, as evidenced by the dated sack of rat poison found at the skeleton's feet. Pretty riveting stuff, huh?

As mentioned by other reviewers, the constant Jeopardy play amongst the main actors is, I suppose, meant to give some depth to the characters, but it quickly becomes an irritating intrusion. They all remain as dull and lifeless as my own hair. In fact, though the book is a first-person narrative, told by the the prosecutor, Alexandra Cooper, it read, to me, like a third-person omnipotent narrative, and I was constantly being jarred back by the 1st person pronouns.

Needless to say . . . Okay, I'll say it: I was so disinterested in this novel, I gave up on it a third of the way through it.