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.