Mistaken identity – usually that’s about the suspect - but in Linda Fairstein’s impressive first novel, the tables are turned. Someone is murdered, but was it meant to be the victim, or the person who was usually at that house and bears a resemblance to the victim (the hero even gets to read her own obituary!)? And what happens when it follows that the owner of the house, a Manhattan District Attorney who specialises in sex crimes, has plenty of enemies who wouldn’t shed a tear at her funeral. So it is not a surprising plot twist when the D.A. finds herself in apparent danger. We’ve seen this sort of thing before – the hunter becomes the hunted, but Fairstein does it well. Another thing we liked was the dialogue – it sounds real, not the contrived stuff we get in many novels of this type. This obviously has a lot to do with the lawyer/writer’s personal experience, which she has been able to translate to paper. What’s great about this book is that it takes you behind the doors of a sex crimes prosecution unit – and there’s no doubting the veracity of that account, because the author occupies the same real life position as her lead character. And we liked the little things the author has constructed around her alter ego character Alex Cooper – she’s not just a hard-nosed District Attorney. At the end of the day she wants comfort, not another file to keep her company! By her side is the profane Mike Chapman, a friendly detective who shares her secrets. There’s nothing here to frighten women readers with visions of Superwoman – Alex is just as harassed and busy as most people in the nervous 90s. It’s all pretty good, but maybe there’s too much of a hint that this is the beginning of a series character, and there are already so many (it’s hard not to think of Kay Scarpetta, the forensic pathologist in Patricia Cornwell’s novels)! Maybe the plot is a bit contrived, but this is a first novel, and we don’t want to be too negative. How does a judge/jury decide if a rape has been committed, especially where there is some doubt? Rape is intertwined with the notion of "consent" ,and in Australia (in general) a person always has the right to say NO. Consent has to be by the person’s free will; so giving in to any sort of force will not amount to consent, even if there was no resistance at all; or even if the victim was absolutely drunk. You do not have to suffer any sort of injury, and it is not a defence that on a previous occasion the victim had in fact consented to sex with the defendant. The problems in evidence occur when the alleged rapist truly believed the alleged victim did consent – the court has to decide whether this is reasonable in the circumstances (so any sort of force will defeat that argument). Consent will usually be a defence to a rape charge, unless the defendant claims that he was not the person who did it in the first place. And although the law does not require any evidence of assault or resistance, this does not mean it cannot be introduced to show that there was in fact consent (obviously any evidence of assault will tend to prove the rape). Can a person be raped because of some sort of fraud? Yes, if the consent is obtained through a false representation, for example, if the victim is led to believe that she and the defendant have been married, and the victim had previously asserted that she would not otherwise consent to sex – believe it or not, this sort of thing has happened in Australia! Of all the current crop of lawyer-writers, Ms Fairstein might legitimately lay claim to be the most interesting (in her real life). The director of the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, she is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction "Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape", where she laid out the law of rape and how it is prosecuted. She has a reputation for fairness – if you want a prosecutor under any situation, she is not your woman. Ms Fairstein will as soon indicate a fraud as a case beyond reasonable doubt. In her book she describes rape in legal terms, and not as a metaphor for the oppression of women, which must have taken a fair amount of guts. There are so many parallels with her fictional hero Alex Cooper its creepy! For instance, besides the same job, in the same place, Cooper and Fairstein share both have a summer house in Martha’s Vineyard. Ms Fairstein established America’s first sex crimes unit, in 1974, so she has seen through a number of the more liberal reforms to rape law. For example, rape victims no longer have to have their evidence "corroborated", that is, have it independently confirmed. This used to allow the presentation of evidence of the alleged victim’s character, often a dissection of their past sex lives. Even more sinister, women were once required to show that they resisted their attackers during the alleged rape. It has almost become a truism that the court room scenes in these genre novels speak louder than the stuff in-between. That’s not so hard to understand – lawyers who write have already developed the rhythm of the court room in their professional lives. It’s a lot more difficult to learn the more subtle rhythms of character development. This is a truly fascinating journey into the police and court room procedures that deal with sex crimes – it’s a bit like reading the FBI accounts of serial killers, the topic is abhorrent but perversely compelling. She’s careful with detail, and in this kind of work, detail is what makes the story (instead of bogging it down). Cooper moves easily between the police cells and the fanciest restaurants. She’s a fully realised hero, and since she is apparently to appear again, we will have the pleasure of her company when Ms Fairstein finds the time in her busy schedule to translate another case file to the word processor.
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