Imus Helps Linda Fairstein with Subject for Next Book

Silent Mercy is the title of Linda Fairstein’s latest novel, but as the head of the sex crimes unit in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office for 20 years, Fairstein was anything but silent, and showed little mercy for perpetrators.
 
“It’s fascinating work,” she told Imus today.  “When I started to do it, we were the first unit of its kind in the country.”
 
She has spun her successful career as a prosecutor into an equally impressive one as a writer, with more than a dozen novels to her name, most of them New York Times Best Sellers that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Each book centers on a fictional Manhattan prosecutor named Alex Cooper, who likely did not encounter the same sort of discrimination Fairstein faced when she was first hired in 1972 by then-DA Frank Hogan.
 
“There were 270 prosecutors in Mr. Hogan’s office, seven of whom were women,” Fairstein recalled. “We were not allowed to try felony cases. I could never have tried a rape case then.”
 
Told that those sort of cases were not “appropriate” for women, Fairstein and her fellow females were instead banished to the law library. But the rules began to change, and she suddenly found herself in a courtroom, working on brutally violent cases with cops who she said often paid her more respect than her fellow attorneys. 
 
“The cops were better than anybody,” she said. “If you worked hard, if you gave back and believed in their cases, you made better progress with them than you did as a young woman with the judges, and sometimes with your colleagues.”
 
Though the sex crimes unit sounds like a depressing place to work, Fairstein insisted it was, at times, uplifting. “For the first 15 years that I did it, DNA was never used forensically—we didn’t even know it existed,” she said. “Once we started using that, it just revolutionized the way we were able to process cases, and find offenders, and take the burden off the victim from making identifications.”
 
As with her other novels, Silent Mercy takes place in New York City, specifically in its religious establishments, places that have mystified Fairstein for years.
 
“Going into these institutions, they’ve had some interesting history, often something sinister went on,” she said. In Silent Mercy, women’s bodies are found at notable churches around Manhattan—like Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street—because, as Fairstein put it, “things that happen in religious settings are some of the darkest things people can do to each other.”
 
Which gave Imus an idea for Fairstein’s next literary venture. “You ought to debrief Bernard McGuirk about his days as an alter boy.”
 
-Julie Kanfer