Author(s): Linda Fairstein

Fiction

The glitzy reception at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art should have been a welcome evening off for Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper. But the occasion is overshadowed by a gruesome discovery: in an ancient sarcophagus bound for a show abroad, customs officials have found the body of a young woman.
Katrina Grooten was a hard-working intern at the Cloisters, the foreboding home of the Museum's collection of medieval art. She'd left her job several months earlier, but her eerily preserved body is grisly proof she'd never returned home to South Africa. The white lines on her fingernails are the telltale sign of her killer's modus operandi: arsenic poisoning.
As Alex and NYPD Detective Mike Chapman begin their investigations, they encounter an establishment whose culture is as curious as the exhibits they display, and whose secrets and rivalries are as ancient. And then they discover a number of mysterious vaults, whose bones hold the clues to Katrina's murder . . .