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COLD CASE SQUAD
by Edna Buchanan
Pocket Books, May 2005
352 pages
$7.99
ISBN: 0743476638


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

COLD CASE SQUAD is one of those books where the setting is the biggest draw -- Miami, in all its hot, sweaty, eccentric glory, elbows its way to centre stage and refuses to budge.

The book itself is perfectly serviceable. I always enjoyed Edna Buchanan's Britt Montero series, and COLD CASE SQUAD clearly draws on Buchanan's knowledge as a reporter on the police beat.

Cold cases are flavour of the month, but this series looks like it will have legs, as several threads remain tantalisingly loose at the end. The plot's fine, although inevitably one strand ended up dominating the rest.

The book opens in 1992 with two seemingly unrelated incidents -- a man and woman are shot dead at a strip club, and a father of three is killed when an explosion rocks a child's birthday party.

Fast-forward 12 years, and a very glamorous blonde walks into the Miami police department's cold case squad. She's been seeing her husband everywhere she goes. Snag is, he's been dead since 1992. The squad's royally screwed-up Lieutenant KC Riley isn't too struck on them spending much time on the case, though, as another featuring the deaths of old people looks more likely to get a result.

One of the strengths of COLD CASE SQUAD is its characters, and Buchanan, like the late and great Ed McBain, can keep control of her rowdy squad room. I enjoyed getting to know detectives Sam Stone and Pete Nazario, and we gradually get to learn what is haunting Riley. And Buchanan generally strikes a good balance between the characters' personal and professional lives.

The only exception is Sergeant Craig Burch and his first person sections. Aside from the fact the ongoing strand about his disintegrating marriage gets dreary quite quickly, his voice sounds 'off' when compared with everyone else's third person.

COLD CASE SQUAD is a page-turner which I devoured impatiently in an afternoon. The characters are engaging, the plotting accomplished -- even if the serial killer strand tails off somewhat -- and it's a series I hope to see more of very soon.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, May 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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