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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jan 2003, 400 pages
Paperback:
Jan 2004, 528 pages
Atmospheric, chilling, and rich with the kind of procedural authenticity that only Linda Fairstein can provide, The Bone Vault is a page-turning tour de force from one of crime writing's brightest stars.
The New York Times bestselling author and renowned former Manhattan prosecutor follows her Nero Award-winning The Deadhouse with a mesmerizing new Alexandra Cooper novel set at the crossroads of big money, high culture, and murder...
The Bone Vault begins in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's glorious Temple of Dendur, where wealthy donors have gathered to celebrate a controversial new exhibit.
An uneasy mix of scholarship, showbiz, and aggressive marketing, "A Modern Bestiary" will be a joint venture of the Met and the American Museum of Natural History. With its IMAX time trips and Rembrandt refrigerator magnets, the "Bestiary" has raised fierce opposition from some of New York's museum elite.
Assistant DA Alexandra Cooper, off duty for the evening, observes the developing tensions with bemused interest until Met director Pierre Thibodaux pulls her aside. He needs her advice. There's an urgent problem out at a loading dock on a New Jersey pier.
A Twelfth Dynasty mummified princess, enclosed for eternity in a huge stone sarcophagus, is about to take a long voyage to Cairo as part of a routine museum exchange. But Cleopatra is missing, and in her place is the not-so-mummified body of a woman many centuries younger than her royal predecessor.
Who is this woman with the small physique, the dark hair, and the shiny barrette? What is her connection, if any, to the rarefied world of priceless art and objects? And how and when did she become entombed in the sarcophagus?
Teaming with cops Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, Alex must explore behind the scenes at the elegant but severe Metropolitan, travel uptown to the remote setting of the Cloisters and its medieval trove of funerary art, and on to the massive array of beasts and bones at the Museum of Natural History. Somewhere deep within the bowels of one of these great cultural centers, a killer may wait.
Atmospheric, chilling, and rich with the kind of procedural authenticity that only Linda Fairstein can provide, The Bone Vault is a page-turning tour de force from one of crime writing's brightest stars.
Chapter One
I spent a long afternoon at the morgue. I had left my desk at the Manhattan district attorney's office shortly after lunch to review autopsy results on a new case with the deputy chief medical examiner. A nineteen-year-old, dressed in an outfit she had bought just hours earlier, was killed outside a social club as she waited on a street corner for her friends.
Now I walked a quiet corridor, again surrounded by death. I did not want to be here. I paused at the entrance of an ancient tomb, its painted limestone facade concealing the false doorway to an underground burial chamber. The faded reliefs that decorated its walls showed offerings of food and drink that would nourish the spirit of the dead. I didn't harbor any hope that the young woman whose body I had seen today would ever be in need of the kind of good meal displayed before me.
I made my way past a granite lion and nodded at the uniformed guard, who slouched on a folding chair beside the elegantly...
Frances Fyfield
A tour de force. Shivers not only the bones but the marrow. Lisa Scottoline
A page-turning tour into some of the deepest and most mysterious recesses of New York's great museums! Nelson DeMille
The Bone Vault is nothing short of brilliant -- witty dialogue, beautiful writing, fascinating locales, superb plot, and a cool cast of characters. Patricia Cornwell
Linda Fairstein's continued rise into the rarefied realm of great crime fiction seems unstoppable. She is beginning to defy gravity. The Bone Vault will spin your head and race you away on a blast of originality, chilling real-world detail, and turbo-charged writing.
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