Linda Fairstein

Linda Fairstein is an American novelist and former prosecutor who spent three decades in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, where she headed the sex-crimes prosecution unit for much of that career and became a nationally recognized figure in the legal handling of sexual-assault cases. She drew on that experience for the long-running Alexandra Cooper series, which began with Final Jeopardy (1996) and follows a Manhattan sex-crimes prosecutor through cases that combine courtroom procedure with New York City history and landmarks, a signature Fairstein used as a structuring device across the series' twenty-plus novels. Before turning to crime fiction, she co-authored a nonfiction work on sexual violence and prosecution, and her novels were praised for the procedural detail she could bring from direct legal experience. Fairstein's public profile became entangled with the Central Park jogger case, which she originally prosecuted and which was later the subject of significant public reassessment; several publishing and professional affiliations ended in the wake of that reassessment. In this catalogue she appears only as one of thirteen authors who each contributed a chapter to I'd Kill For That (2004), a collaborative relay novel written to raise money for breast-cancer research.