Linda Fairstein (born 1947) is an American crime writer and former Manhattan assistant district attorney whose fiction draws on legal procedure and New York City institutions. She served in the New York County District Attorney’s Office for three decades and was chief of its Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit for more than twenty years; in 2002, she testified that the unit had been the first of its kind in the United States.
After studying English at Vassar College and law at the University of Virginia, Fairstein joined the Manhattan district attorney’s office in 1972. Her nonfiction Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape was published in 1993. She moved into crime fiction with Final Jeopardy, which introduced Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper. The series places its investigations amid recognizable city sites and cultural institutions, combining courtroom and police-work elements with local history.
The Bone Vault is an Alexandra Cooper novel set around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cloisters, and the American Museum of Natural History. Fairstein’s Alexandra Cooper books have been published internationally and translated into more than a dozen languages, according to her publisher. In a 2017 CUNY TV interview, she discussed shaping suspense through the recurring questions that propel a mystery narrative.
This profile is awaiting source review; collected books are already linked below.
