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Sunday, May 18, 2003

By Sylvia Sachs

Linda Fairstein's 25 years as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney's office proved the real-life background for her mystery series featuring Assistant D.A. Alexandra Cooper of the same office.

The fifth in the series displays another area of expertise -- the activities in both the public and behind-the-scenes areas of the enormous Metropolitan Museum and the American Museum of American History in New York City.

	"The Bone Vault" By Linda Fairstein Scribner ($25)

Anyone who has ever had a tour backstage at a museum (even a much smaller one than the Met) will recognize the correctness of the descriptions. One wonders how the author got the OK to set her fictional actions and almost recognizable museum personnel in this thriller.

As in the past, Alex works closely with homicide detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace (especially Mike) on the death of Katrina Grooten, a young museum researcher whose body turns up in a sarcophagus that previously had held the mummified body of an Egyptian princess.

The sarcophagus was part of a huge museum exchange involved with an upcoming controversial exhibit, "Modem Bestiary," being organized as a duo presentation by the two museums, and was about to be shipped off to a museum in Cairo, where the body would surely disintegrate and never be recovered.

When shown photographs taken of the dead girl, Pierre Thibodaux, the new director of the art museum, seems to have forgotten he knew the young woman until his loyal assistant, Eve Drexler, reminds him of her identity.

She had been working at The Cloisters, the medieval building that is a branch of the Met, but had been recruited to work on the big exhibit.

Well, that's the beginning of much deception and revelation of museum world politics as well as interesting personal entanglements among museum employees at all levels.

The search for clues in the spooky acres of underground warehouses is fascinating and chilling -- bottles of bugs and barrels of bones -- in addition to contacts with a variety of workers who spend their days in their rather dark, dreary place.

As is required in most current mysteries, the personal lives of the investigators get some attention. Alex's love life with a famous TV reporter gets a cursory look, but her best friend has pointed out that it is unsuitable and unworthy of our heroine.

Wallace's happily married state and the expected arrival of his first child are examined by the close-knit trio of investigators. And Chapman's serious relationship with Val, a recovering cancer patient, seems somewhat tenuous.

Let's hope Alex and Mike will wake up and get it together in the next book.

Making her detective characters real is not Fairstein's strongest talent but she builds an admirable mystery plot in her latest.

Sylvia Sachs is retired book editor of The Pittsburgh Press.