This image is the cover for the book Bad Blood, Alex Cooper

Bad Blood, Alex Cooper

New York Times bestselling and Nero Award–winning author Linda Fairstein takes readers to the greatest heights and deepest depths of New York City in this riveting Alexandra Cooper thriller, filled with the former prosecutor’s unique blend of authenticity, history, and suspense.

Bad Blood finds Assistant DA Alexandra Cooper deeply involved in a complicated, high-profile homicide case. Defendant Brendan Quillian, a prominent young businessman, is charged with the brutal strangulation of his beautiful young wife, Amanda. His conviction is not a certainty: Quillian was conveniently out of town on the day of the killing, and he has hired a formidable defense attorney who seems one step ahead of Cooper as the trial opens. But with the help of detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, she is confident she can prove Quillian paid a hit man to commit the crime.

Halfway through the trial, a major catastrophe alters the course of Alex's case. A cataclysmic ex-plosion rips through New York City's Water Tunnel #3, a spectacular feat of modern engineering that will be completed years in the future. Carved through bedrock six hundred feet underground, the tunnel will replace a vital artery in the city's rapidly deteriorating water supply system. Was the blast caused by terrorism? Political retribution? Or was it merely an accident? Cooper is quickly drawn into the trag-edy when she discovers a strange connection linking Brendan Quillian to the tunnel workers killed in the explosion.

At the same time, Alex meets a mysterious, handsome stranger. Should she get to know him better? Before the answer is clear, she is pulled back into the case, which is becoming more dangerous by the hour. She and Chapman descend deep into the earth to penetrate the subterranean universe of the sandhogs, as the brotherhood of tunnel workers are colorfully known. Their probe soon leads to another murder victim, whose blood may hold the key to Cooper's mesmerizingly complex case. One closely held secret reveals another, and soon Alex discovers that only by unraveling ancient rivalries among sandhog families will she be able to solve the murder of Amanda Quillian—and save her own life as well.

A riveting tale of up-to-the-minute urban intrigue, Bad Blood is rich with New York City lore and fascinating legal insights that only Fairstein, Manhattan's former sex crimes prosecutor, can deliver. Told in her signature authentic style, Bad Blood is packed with the same twists and turns that made her last novel, Death Dance, a runaway bestseller and that never fail to thrill her legions of devoted readers.

Linda Fairstein

Linda Fairstein is one of America’s foremost legal experts on violent crimes against women and children, and a former chief of the Manhattan District Attorney’s pioneering Special Victims Bureau. She developed many of the techniques that have revolutionized the prosecution of sexual predators, including her early introduction of DNA as a forensic tool. Fairstein is also the author of an internationally bestselling series of crime novels featuring her fictional alter ego, Alex Cooper. The fourteenth book in the series, Night Watch, was published in July 2012. Fairstein has been a contributing editor to Cosmopolitan magazine since 2002. Visit her website at www.lindafairstein.com.

Scribner