SummaryThe 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.
| 
