Alexandra Cooper

About the Alexandra Cooper series

Alexandra Cooper is the head of the Sex Crimes Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, working New York homicide and sexual-assault cases alongside NYPD detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace across twenty novels by former real-life Manhattan sex-crimes prosecutor Linda Fairstein. Fairstein spent nearly three decades running the actual unit her fictional heroine leads, and the series draws heavily on that career: courtroom procedure, the mechanics of building a prosecutable case, and the specific texture of investigating crimes against women in New York City are rendered with a working prosecutor's authority rather than an outsider's research. The series opens with Final Jeopardy (1996), introducing Cooper alongside Chapman and Wallace, and each subsequent entry pairs a self-contained case with a distinctive slice of New York institutional history or geography -- the city's museums in The Bone Vault, its subway tunnels in Hell Gate, its High Line and West Side development in Terminal City. Fairstein kept the series running at roughly a book a year for over two decades. Blood Oath (2019) is the final entry: following public backlash over Fairstein's own history prosecuting the Central Park Five case after the 2019 Netflix series When They See Us, her publisher ended their relationship with her that June, and no further Alexandra Cooper novel has followed.