Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper must prosecute a sensational murder case. The defendant is a rich businessman accused of strangling his wife. His lawyer is brilliant and flamboyant. The judge is a cranky little man. And the spectators are everyone in New York City, thanks to the media circus of print- and television-journalists.

Alex has so much evidence to keep organized that she actually sits in the courtroom with a SHOPPING CART full of it, folders color-coordinated to place whatever she needs close at hand. She and Lem (the defense attorney) go toe-to-toe, each attempting to influence the jury. Touchy-feely Lem strokes his client’s back as if comforting the poor guy for the death of his wife. Alex constantly refers to the man as “the defendant” to remind the jurors that he is on trial for murder.

The trial sequence wraps up with a terrible shock for Alex when Lem cross-examines her star witness. Good golly, it’s a biggie, and the stuff of which lawyers have nightmares!

Totally floored, Alex goes to dinner with her old friend Mike, a homicide detective. But even as they sip their wine and enjoy their pasta, a city-wide emergency breaks out. Sirens fill the streets, and all cops including Mike are notified that an explosion has occurred in the subterranean levels beneath Manhattan. Terrorists? Earthquake?

Or perhaps something more complicated that drags Alex and Mike into an investigation 600 feet BELOW the streets of Manhattan. There a secretive fraternity of “sand-hogs” (construction engineers) toils to rebuild the water tunnels that supply Manhattan.

No one knows much about the sand-hogs. They are mostly descended from the Irish of a century ago who were then the only immigrants desperate enough to do such dangerous work. Sand-hogs perished by the dozens while building the Brooklyn Bridge.

Guess what? The defendant in Alex’s trial came from a sand-hog family before marrying into money. Soon Alex and Mike face a quest for answers leading them into subterranean Manhattan, and igniting a decades-old blood feud.

What is there to admire about Bad Blood? A lot, actually. Author Linda Fairstein injects so much realism into both trial and police-procedural details that you feel like a cop or a lawyer. She writes convincing male characters: Mike is a guy’s guy if there ever was one. She teaches the reader a lot through the fluid, succinct dialog of characters explaining her research to each other.

She also gives her people some vivid quirks. Mike is a history buff addicted to the game-show Jeopardy. Lem is known as Mr. Triplicate because he always declaims in three linked phrases: (as on p.8) “ … the People’s case was ‘dreadfully flimsy, paper-thin, a gossamer web of fabrications.’”

What’s to gripe about in Bad Blood? Well, not much, except that the characters struck me as flat.

Alex and Mike are vehicles for good ideas and a twisty plot. Nothing wrong with that! It’s just that you’re not going to enjoy the deeper emotional level in Bad Blood that you’ll find in a series in which characters struggle with personal issues from book to book. (By contrast, look at Elizabeth George’s first book in her Inspector Lynley series: A Great Deliverance.)

Here, Alex’s romance with a French chef will make you impatient. You never get a sense that anything more than professional pride is propelling Alex and Mike through this book’s adventure.

To give you an idea of what I mean, in one scene Alex sees a friend shot in the head right in front of her. Later on, a subway almost crushes her and Mike when they get stuck on the tracks. Both predicaments gave Alex heroic stuff to do, but no real emotions to feel. Is she a super-woman or what? You can find Bad Blood at Amazon through this link: Bad Blood: A Novel (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries)