True Crime Helped Ex-Prosecutor Plot Latest Novel, 'Lethal Legacy'
When Linda Fairstein is looking for a plot for her latest crime novel, the former career prosecutor finds the news to be a handy resource.
Fairstein relied on an actual New York case when she opens her new book, Lethal Legacy, with a fake fireman ringing the doorbell of a woman’s apartment—after starting a fire outside her door and setting off a smoke bomb—Bloomberg reports
“What woman wouldn’t open a door when she smells smoke?” says Fairstein, a best-selling author and former career prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office who headed the sex crimes unit there for 25 years.
Her new book also puts a body in the basement of the stately New York Public Library building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, the news agency reports, and Fairstein—who needed cooperation from the library to plot it—was afraid administrators might turn up their noses at her commercial fiction.
Fortunately for Fairstein and her readers, however, it turned out that David Ferriero, who is in charge of research at the library, is a crime novel fan.
He couldn’t have been more helpful, according to Fairstein, and seeing the assortment of deadly tools kept in coffee mugs in the conservation lab was a revelation to her, she tells Bloomberg. “I knew then a conservator was going to die.”
