A review by weaselweader
Death Dance by Linda Fairstein
2.0
"Overture ... curtain, lights! This is it ... we'll hit the heights!”
When New York Assistant DA Alex Cooper teams up with her police colleagues, Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, to solve the murder of prima ballerina and outrageous diva, Natalya Galinova, readers are treated to a backstage tour of the New York music and theater scene that any arts-loving tourist would give their eye teeth for. We meet the dancers, actors and musicians, the show girls, the technicians, the on-stage grunts, the administrators and management, and the über-wealthy production financiers whose pockets are, to all appearances, bottomless. We tour the orchestra pit, stage front, backstage, refreshment loges, balconies, dressing rooms and rehearsal halls. We learn of the architecture and history of the buildings – Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera House, City Center and the Belasco Theatre.
Unfortunately, despite this fabulous backdrop (did you catch that stage reference?), the plot that Fairstein has woven for her readers manages to be at once byzantine, pedestrian and melodramatic. The Berk family on which most time is spent becomes cartoonish. Admittedly, the alleged bad guys in a thriller aren’t supposed to be lovable folks but their self-centered narcissism, their overweaning pomposity and arrogance, their self-indulgent sexual perversion and their outrageous misogyny dominated the narrative and simply became tedious.
In the meantime, the secondary plot which showed so much promise in the opening chapter becomes a missed opportunity and is all but ignored through most of the novel. Drug assisted sexual assault, the ethics of DNA databases, bail versus release on an alleged criminal’s own recognizance, flight risk and international extradition – all that meat smelled so delicious when it first got dropped onto the grill but the chef walked away and left this reader hungry with his stomach rumbling loudly.
Weakly recommended for fans of the Alex Cooper series. I hope this one doesn’t mean that her curtain is about to come down.
Paul Weiss
When New York Assistant DA Alex Cooper teams up with her police colleagues, Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, to solve the murder of prima ballerina and outrageous diva, Natalya Galinova, readers are treated to a backstage tour of the New York music and theater scene that any arts-loving tourist would give their eye teeth for. We meet the dancers, actors and musicians, the show girls, the technicians, the on-stage grunts, the administrators and management, and the über-wealthy production financiers whose pockets are, to all appearances, bottomless. We tour the orchestra pit, stage front, backstage, refreshment loges, balconies, dressing rooms and rehearsal halls. We learn of the architecture and history of the buildings – Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera House, City Center and the Belasco Theatre.
Unfortunately, despite this fabulous backdrop (did you catch that stage reference?), the plot that Fairstein has woven for her readers manages to be at once byzantine, pedestrian and melodramatic. The Berk family on which most time is spent becomes cartoonish. Admittedly, the alleged bad guys in a thriller aren’t supposed to be lovable folks but their self-centered narcissism, their overweaning pomposity and arrogance, their self-indulgent sexual perversion and their outrageous misogyny dominated the narrative and simply became tedious.
In the meantime, the secondary plot which showed so much promise in the opening chapter becomes a missed opportunity and is all but ignored through most of the novel. Drug assisted sexual assault, the ethics of DNA databases, bail versus release on an alleged criminal’s own recognizance, flight risk and international extradition – all that meat smelled so delicious when it first got dropped onto the grill but the chef walked away and left this reader hungry with his stomach rumbling loudly.
Weakly recommended for fans of the Alex Cooper series. I hope this one doesn’t mean that her curtain is about to come down.
Paul Weiss