Dutton
Featuring: Alex Cooper
464 pages ISBN: 1101984031 EAN: 9781101984031 Kindle: B017SCQLO6 Mass Market Paperback / e-Book (reprint) Add to Wish List
Alexandra Cooper guides us around New York City's Garment
District in the eighteenth book of this self-titled series.
She is a prosecutor in the District Attorney's office, and
as the crime story opens, she is recovering from an
abduction ordeal. Usually Cooper works on sex crime cases,
some of them high profile. But on leave, she indulges her
taste for fashion instead by tagging along with her
detective boyfriend as he investigates murder. When someone
says an outfit has a KILLER LOOK it doesn't denote a murder
-- except when it does.
An African-American model is found dead in the East River,
and a fashion designer Wolf Savage -- or Savitsky, depending
on whom you ask - is thought to have taken his own life in
his hotel room. Any other week, nobody would connect the
two, but the designer's collection is about to be shown at
the Museum of Modern Art, so he seems to have had no reason
to be depressed. Detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer
Wallace, longtime friends, investigate and decide that the
cases must be linked.
After spending most of the lengthy series as just friends,
Cooper and Chapman are now lovers, a change I confess I
find it hard to manage mentally. Cooper, from middle class
wealth, drinks far too much spirits and doesn't even
stumble although she eats little. Chapman, who has always
been a New York Irish wisemouth, is now far too
controlling, constantly remarks on Coop's previous
boyfriends and badgers her about her tippling while
bringing her wine.
I expect the majority of readers of this series are women,
which is just as well because the garment industry is one
calculated to appeal more to women. Cooper lands in it up
to her neck, literally -- and that is after talking her way
around models, seamstresses, button collectors, exhibition
curators, and haute couture fashion house owners. With a nod
to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and similar disasters in
Asian garment factories today, we can see that where
clothes make big money there will always be someone
profiting at the expense of others. The biggest buyers of
stupidly high priced clothes today are revealed to be
Middle East ladies, but the killer being sought is a lot
closer to home.
Another sombre note is the Alexandra Cooper series by
Linda Fairstein always featured DA Paul Battaglia in a semi-
starring role, but in KILLER LOOK the upright politician
has turned into a carnival version of the man we knew. I've
read the next book already, so I know why.
New York City is one of the fashion capitals of the world,
well-known for its glamour and style. Nowhere is this more
apparent than on the runway, where American haute couture
continually astounds with its creativity, daring, and
innovation in the name of beauty. Yet high fashion means
high stakes, as Alex Cooper quickly discovers when
businessman and designer Wolf Savage is found dead in an
apparent suicide, mere days before the biggest show of his
career. When the man's daughter insists Savage’s death was
murder, the case becomes more than a media sensation: It is
a race to find a killer in a world created entirely out of
fantasy and illusion.
With her own job at the DA's office in jeopardy, and the
temptation to self-medicate her PTSD with alcohol almost too
strong to resist, Alex is not anyone's first choice for
help. But she is determined to uncover the grime—and the
possible homicide—beneath the glitz. Along with detectives
Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, Alex must penetrate the
twisted roots and mixed motives among the high-profile
players in the Garment District. The investigation takes
the trio from the missing money in Wolf Savage's
international fashion house to his own recovery from
addiction; from the role of Louisiana Voodoo in his life to
his excessive womanizing; and to the family secrets he kept
so well-hidden, even from those closest to him—just as
things are about to get deadly on the catwalk.
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