When Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper is summoned to Tina Barr's apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, she finds a neighbor convinced that the young woman was assaulted. But the terrified victim, a conservator of rare books and maps, refuses to cooperate with investigators. Then another woman is found murdered in that same apartment with an extremely valuable book, believed to have been stolen. As Alex pursues the murderer, she is drawn into the strange and privileged world of the Hunt family.

When Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper is summoned to Tina Barr's apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, she finds a neighbor convinced that the young woman was assaulted. But the terrified victim, a conservator of rare books and maps, refuses to cooperate with investigators. Then another woman is found murdered in that same apartment with an extremely valuable book, believed to have been stolen.

Success can never be guaranteed in every case Alexandra Cooper prosecutes, but for once the odds are with her; she is able to put away a serial rapist for a crime he committed over twenty years previously. But outside the courtroom another predator is at large.

It's August in New York, and the only thing that's hotter than the pavement is Manhattan D.A. Alex Cooper's professional and personal life. Just as she's claiming an especially gratifying victory in a rape case, she gets the call: the body of a young woman has been found in an abandoned building. The brutality of the murder is disturbing enough, but when a second body, beaten and disposed of in exactly same manner, is found off the Belt Parkway, the city's top brass want the killer found fast.

It's August in New York, and the only thing that's hotter than the pavement is Manhattan D.A. Alex Cooper's professional and personal life. Just as she's claiming an especially gratifying victory in a rape case, she gets the call: the body of a young woman has been found in an abandoned building. The brutality of the murder is disturbing enough, but when a second body, beaten and disposed of in exactly same manner, is found off the Belt Parkway, the city's top brass want the killer found fast.

Alexandra Cooper has a tough case to prosecute. Businessman Brendan Quillan has been charged with hiring an assassin to kill his wife, but the evidence is flimsy. Then an explosion kills Quillan's construction worker brother. The blast isn't a terrorist act, nor is it an accident, but it looks as though Duke Quillan was the target. None of the investigating team had any idea that Brendan had a brother, never mind one so far on the other side of the tracks.

Alex Cooper awakens one morning to news of her own brutal murder. Soon, Manhattan's top sex-crimes prosecutor discovers that the actual victim is film star Isabella Lascar, who had sought refuge at Alex's private retreat. Now it is up to Alex to find the killer before another victim surfaces.

New York City's oldest medical center is the scene of a ghastly attack: top neurosurgeon Gemma Dogen is found in her office, where she has been sexually assaulted and designated by the cops as a "likely to die". By the time assistant D.A. Alexandra Cooper has plunged into the case, it's a high-profile, media-infested murder investigation. As Alex's passion to find the killer intensifies, she discovers that she is the next target for lethal violence.

Assistant D.A. Alexandra Cooper is deeply involved in a complicated, high-profile homicide case against defendant Brendan Quillian, a prominent young businessman who is charged with the strangulation of his beautiful young wife. His conviction is not a certainty: Quillian was conveniently out of town on the day of the killing, and his defense attorney seems to be one step ahead of Cooper's effort to prove Quillian paid a hit man to commit the crime.

Workers demolishing a 19th-century brownstone where Poe once lived discover a human skeleton standing, entombed, behind a brick wall. When assistant district attorney and sex crimes prosecutor Alexandra Cooper hears about the case, it strikes her as a classic scene from Poe's fiction...except that forensic evidence shows that this young woman died within the last 25 years.