The Deadhouse

Linda Fairstein

Average Rating 8/10 (1 Review)

University professor Lola Dakota has suffered at the hands of her abusive husband for too long and when the police get wind of his plan to hire a hitman to kill her, she agrees to take part in an undercover operation to fake her own murder. The sting seems successful and her husband is arrested. However, less than a couple of hours later and Lola is dead again . . . this time for good.

Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper is brought in to assist NYPD detectives Chapman and Wallace to find the killer. They are led into the academic world at Columbia University and find it to be riddled with petty jealousies, rumours of love affairs and swindled funds. Alex gradually uncovers tales about missing students, drug dealers and something referred to as the Deadhouse, which leads her to an island just off Manhattan, where Lola's department was researching the remains of a Victorian penitentiary, hospitals and lunatic asylums.

To Alex, what was once a romantic refuge of history now seems to hide a past so dark it fuels the greed and passions of this microcosm of New York academia. She needs to find the driving force behind these acts of murder before the Deadhouse reclaims its secrets for ever...

Review by Chrissi (010202) Rating (8/10)

Review by Chrissi
Rating 8/10
This was the latest Linda Fairstein to be released and I found it in Waterstones and bought it with my Christmas book tokens. (Other women get tokens for face massages and stuff, I get books!) I think that one of the reasons I like her is that everything is so meticulous, you really do feel that she has done the research so carefully and thoroughly that it is all real. I do not know whether the building or the islands in New York that are at the centre of the story are real, but they could be, and as far as I am concerned are as real to me as New York itself.

The Deadhouse is about a series of crimes connected with an old set of buildings on an island that has had several names but was used to house the sick and the criminals. The story is part treasure hunt and part human drama, the conditions of the old hospital were inhumane but that was how people were treated, we have old hospitals in which we hid away all those who would have offended the delicate eyes and ears of mainstream society. Well, the Deadhouse is a derelict old building and part of a modern anthropology project.

Alex Cooper becomes involved when a woman who was supposed to have been safe from her violent husband because he was arrested for arranging her death, is found dead shortly after the sting operation. The fact that a different department staged the operation means that Alex has to fight to keep control of the investigation.

I think that this lady deserves a following such as those of Patricia Cornwell and Val McDermid, and I do not think that it will be long in building to that level. These are well-written, beautifully plotted and extremely addictive stories, and I hope that there will be many more.
Chrissi (1st February 2002)