‘Cold Case Squad’ a page turner

Sun., Aug. 8, 2004

Peggy McMullen The Oregonian

Edna Buchanan has been cranking out police stories for decades: first as a Miami Herald reporter, then through her classic compilation of crime stories “The Corpse Had a Familiar Face” and her fictional police procedurals.

The workhorse of the cop-on-the-beat mystery, Buchanan has been famously quoted as saying her goal is “a lead that will cause a reader at his breakfast table to spit up his coffee, clutch at his heart, and shout, ‘My God, Martha, did you read this?’ “

There’s been a lot of spitting and clutching over the years as her hot, humid Miami setting and her willingness to get down and gritty built her a horde of fans.

With her latest novel, “Cold Case Squad,” Buchanan launches a new series revolving around four detectives in a special unit dedicated to unsolved homicides.

The story opens on a May morning in 1992 with a brutal double murder in a strip club and then, a few hours later, another death in a fiery explosion in an upscale neighborhood’s garage. A dozen years later, April Terrell shows up at the squad room, saying she’s noticing her ex-husband, Charles, everywhere she goes. Charles, however, is the man pronounced dead in the home explosion more than a decade earlier.

Initially the detectives think April’s seeing things, but then they find that Charles’ widow, Natasha, remarried only six months after the accident and that he had ties to enough shady activities to make police switch the case from accidental death to homicide. Meanwhile, the detectives also are trying to catch a serial killer who’s murdering elderly women.

Buchanan arms her detectives with down-to-earth humor and technical know-how and keeps things bouncing between the cases and characters. “Cold Case Squad” is not, however, her best work. The characters are uneven and the dialogue at times reads like a cliched rant.

But even with the occasional triteness and overwriting, Buchanan remains entertaining. She loves Miami, crime and telling stories, and she’ll keep readers turning the pages to see what she’s up to next.

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