Series mystery novels have begun to lose some of their unique appeal, due to the glut of procedural crime shows like CSI and Law & Order. And the novelists themselves don't always help their cause. Linda Fairstein's Entombed is the seventh book to feature her New York sex-crimes prosecutor Alexandra Cooper, and coarse language aside, it doesn't contain much that'd be out of place on prime-time TV. Cooper has bantering sidekicks—sympathetic cops who chide her about a nonexistent sex life and swap $20 bets on Jeopardy questions—and she has an array of bosses and rivals who make the job harder than it has to be. It's all comfortably familiar, and more than a little generic.
Too often, the routinely colorful character business gets in the way of a good mystery. In Entombed, Cooper is working on three intertwined cases: A woman's bones have been found walled into a basement, while another woman has been sexually assaulted and murdered by someone copying the M.O. of an on-the-loose serial sex offender dubbed "The Silk Stocking Rapist." Cooper scrambles from one crime scene to the next, and as the body count rises, she notices some odd connections. The bones were found in a dwelling once occupied by Edgar Allen Poe, and all the victims had their own Poe fetishes.
Fairstein once headed a New York sex-crimes unit, and she wrote a well-received non-fiction book on sexual violence, so the public perception of rape is very much on her mind. She holds up the action more than once to get on a soapbox, inserting a scene where a young black woman lies about an assault to get back at a boyfriend, and another scene where an elderly grand-jury member asks whether it's legally rape if the woman doesn't fight back. Fairstein also pauses for lectures on Poe's life and work, and for tours of lesser-known NYC landmarks. The New York history lessons and restaurant reviews provide some needed flavor, but though Entombed is cleverly plotted, Fairstein never solves the mystery of how to make a once-a-year book series as conveniently entertaining as what readers can watch on TV every week.