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?