Book By Edna Buchanan, September 2007

Simon and Schuster
320 pages, hardcover, $25

No one likes a rut. When a mystery author creates a compelling character – and then builds a series around that character – it’s easy to fall into a trap. To break out, the author creates another fictional character and builds a series around that character. Somewhere down the line, some wise acre at the publishers’ office suggests that the author have the characters meet.

Robert B. Parker has done it with Spenser and his two other fictional creations, Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone. Michael Connelly might someday have his long-running hero, Harry Bosch, meet his fictional half-brother, Mickey Haller of The Lincoln Lawyer.And someone has decided that Edna Buchanan’s tough Miami reporter Britt Montero must meet the members of the cold-case squad from another series of Buchanan books.

Bad idea, that. In Love Kills, Britt Montero is her usual tough-talking self, striding through the familiar territory of a Miami newspaper newsroom. Buchanan explored this terrain as the Pulitzer winning police reporter of the Miami Herald. She began the Britt Montero series not long after leaving the paper and switched to the cold-case squad novels a few years ago.

Problem is, the cold-case detectives have all the personality of corrugated paper. They are cartoons who represent all the recommended daily ethnic groups and who speak in sitcom dialogue. Montero, on the other hand, is closer to Buchanan’s bone and much more a real character. The book is out of balance, like a film in which Meryl Streep plays opposite Felix the Cat.

Love Kills moves along because of its plots – two intertwined mysteries – and Montero’s involvement with both. She mourns her dead lover, a detective who fathered her unborn child and who had a long-running affair with Katherine Riley, head of the cold-case squad. Add that element and you understand the mess – emotional and otherwise – Montero is in. She’s on a Caribbean grief vacation when she finds a disposable camera of a newlywed couple. Back in Miami, she learns the young bride had been killed at sea. The groom is found, turns out to make for a heart-tugging story, then disappears. Only after he’s gone North does Montero realize he’s a serial killer who specializes in murdering women he just married.

Meanwhile, the cold-case squad investigates another murder and somewhere down the road you know these two plots will intersect. The detectives serve a minor role in Love Kills and don’t even provide much in the way of comic relief.

Reviewed by William McKeen