Cold Case Squad (Mass Market Paperback)

Buchanan knows plots, though. Squad boss K.C. Riley sidelines a promising serial-killer investigation to re-examine an accidental burning death because of her own grief over the similar death of her faithless former lover (also Montero's former lover). A couple of active and increasingly desperate killers dodge a team of smart cops in an accelerating plot of twists and turns that never quite wriggles clear of the writing problems.

COLD CASE SQUAD begins with two prologues, both of them chronicling apparently unrelated incidents taking place in Miami within 24 hours of each other in June 1992. One is a double murder that takes place in a striptease establishment; the other is an explosion and fire that takes the life of a father of three. One act is deliberate, the other an apparent accident. The murders go unsolved; for the survivors of the explosion, life goes on.

The meat of the book begins with Sergeant Craig Burch of the Miami Police Department's Cold Case Squad taking a complaint from a woman who believes that she has been seeing her ex-husband in several places. The problem is that her ex-husband died twelve years previously in an explosion. It does not seem like a matter that the Cold Case Squad should be dealing with --- their mission concerns old murder cases that have not been solved --- and, indeed, Burch is about to send the woman on her way when his boss, Lieutenant K.C. Riley, inexplicably orders the squad to investigate the matter. The team slowly but methodically begins to detect a link between the apparently unrelated murders and explosion that took place in June 1992, and the woman's complaint.

Buchanan does a masterful job here, painstakingly establishing the connection point by point while making the reader care about the detectives involved. Burch, in particular, is dealing with his estranged wife, who is harassing him at the station, and elsewhere. Buchanan somehow manages to elicit some sympathy for the wife, even while painting her as a world-class pain. At the same time, Detective Sam Stone of the Squad has discovered an apparent link between a series of murders spanning decades and occurring throughout the country, including Miami, little suspecting that his investigation will put a loved one directly into the target of the killer. Buchanan ratchets up the suspense throughout the story, switching points of view among several individuals and cases, maintaining momentum without confusing the reader, while heading toward a cataclysmic ending.

COLD CASE SQUAD may well be Buchanan's best work to date. This is the first title in a new series. Given that advances in forensic science are enabling police departments to reopen investigations into previously unsolvable murders, there should be interest in this series, as well as renewed, and well-deserved, attention to Buchanan. Highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

The first case involves Charles Terrell who was killed when he was working on his car when it exploded, burning him to a crisp. The coroner concluded that an accident occurred but twelve years later, his ex-wife asks them to reopen the case . She believes he was murdered because he was so fussy and meticulous, he would never work with faulty tools. Also Detective Stone discovers through the internet and databases unavailable at the time of the Terrell death that a serial killer was murdering female senior citizens. Although both cases seem impossible to solve the team is confident that they will find the killers.

COLD CASE SQUAD is an action-filled exciting police procedural that starts off at light speed and only gets faster as the story progresses. As comic relief one of the detective's wives, furious with her husband, plays practical jokes on him that relieves the tension when it threatens to explode. Edna Buchanan gives readers an insider's look at a group of men and women dedicated to finding killers no matter how long they have gotten away with murder.

Harriet Klausner