By John Hood
For
a town hell-bent on a tan, Miami sure seems to get under
your skin. Better yet, once the city is there it stays
there, sluicing through the blood and embedding in the
bone, even when the former’s been spilled and the
latter’s been broken.
Really.
Just ask Britt Montero, ace reporter for The Miami
News, who wouldn’t, couldn’t live anywhere else.
When last we saw the wily woman, her fiancé, Major
Kendall McDonald, had been blown to bits and she was
understandably at quick wit’s end. Now, in Love Kills
(Simon & Schuster, $25), we find her self-obsessing on a
Caribbean island, and itchy for the city of her birth.
’Course it helps that best gal pal Lottie Dane has
surfed in with wild news from the back alley front.
Seems a sordid sort named Spencer York has just been
found in pieces, and MPD’s Cold Case Squad would like to
have a word or three with the AWOL journalist. Why?
Montero’s probably the last person to see the bad man
alive.
But don’t think for a sec that Edna Buchanan’s content
to keep her kick-ass alter ego swingin’ from a singular
sensational murder, no matter how gruesomely juicy the
story. This, after all, is Britt Montero we’re talkin’
’bout, the kinda dame who wouldn’t sit still for a
hurricane, and, yes, this is Miami, where even a
hurricane sometimes gets second billing to the killing
spree at hand.
And what a delightfully sinister spree the city and sea
hand her — newlyweds, newly deads and a cat who’s taken
at least nine wives. Not to mention a trail that takes
our cunning heroine from Miami to Alaska with no
shortage of uneasy stops between.
Clipped from a chapter in the Edgar-nominated The
Corpse Had a Familiar Face, and combining the two
subsequent series of fictions that have made her more
than a mere Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter,
Buchanan’s latest shows the mark of a pen that knows
well its target. That said target just so happens to be
on our own foreheads only makes her shooting that much
surer. This is our city, these are our streets and,
whether we dig it or not, crime is the story of our
lives. Might as well read into it.
Edna Buchanan reads
from Love
Kills, Thursday, June 21, 8 p.m. at Books & Books,
265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. For more information call
305-442-4408. Comments?
Hood is online at
www.therealjohnhood.com.
Comments?
E-mail
letters@miamisunpost.com.
