ballet
Corpse de Ballet
The opening is routine bread-and-butter work for Alexander Cooper from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office: a case of two female Canadian tourists drugged and raped by a Turkish doctor. It’s the eighth book in Linda Farstein‘s Alex Cooper thrillers so she’s established her credentials.
Alongside her role dealing with sex crimes, Alex pulls strings to get involved officially in a much higher profile case: a famous Russian prima ballerina, Natalya Galinova, who goes missing, and is found dead at the bottom of a filthy air circulation shaft in the very palatial opera house where she had been performing – killed with thousands of people milling about both in front of house and backstage. Her skull is split into pieces, her neck twisted obscenely, multiple massive internal injuries, hands tied behind her back so nothing to break the 120mph fall, her famous legs grotesquely broken and bent, blood everywhere. She was alive when she was thrown over the edge. The perpetrator had made her take off one of her pointe shoes prior to the fall; the ribbons used to tie her hands.
Dramatic incidents follow swiftly – a man is electrocuted by a manhole cover; a teenager falls from a velvet swing in the theatre. In an industry that thrives on superstition, there’s a growing sense of the show being jinxed.
Alex and her long-time friends and colleagues, NYPD’s Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, are introduced to the amazingly intricate and vast warren of the opera building with its miles of corridors, anterooms, secret lifts and staircases, and sophisticated machinery that makes the magic on stage possible, much of it known only to an elite few.
I watched a ballet in the middle of reading this book, Death Dance, and was rivetted by the scene changes and clever effects in a way I’d not been before. The split second timing, the dangers, the skills of those handling the electrics and mechanics … the potential for things to go catastrophically wrong. Knowing that unseen hordes of people contribute to the seamless perfection we pay to see.
Detail by detail Alex et al piece together a murky world of voyeurism and greed, of obscene wealth and total lack of morality, of competition and ruthless drive. Impossible to guess the outcome but the inside look at a world of outward glamour and artistry is fascinating. And I love the lively believable dialogue and banter between the three friends; the wry humour, the veiled insults. They would give their lives for each other.
There’s a special skill in creating series and keeping tabs on character’s histories and features. Farstein does this brilliantly.