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Edna Buchanan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning police reporter for the Miami Herald, is back with the second in her Cold Case Squad novels. Buchanan's previous fiction franchise was a series of mysteries featuring Britt Montero, a reporter at a fictional Miami daily paper.
The Cold Case stories are police procedurals that feature some characters originally introduced in the Montero novels, including Sgt. Craig Burch, Detective Pete Nazario and Lt. K.C. Riley. Those common characters help make the Cold Case Squad mysteries comfortably familiar to Buchanan fans. The focus on cold cases also gives Buchanan an opportunity to show her love of Miami's very unique geographical and cultural landscape as well as weaving in history with a fictional back story.
The novel gets off to a slow start, which may turn off readers new to Buchanan. That's unfortunate, because the plot of the SHADOWS is worth sticking with until the end. This tale centers on an estate that once belonged to one of Miami's most prominent families. The family has at least two mysteries in its past: the disappearance of the rumrunning patriarch and the murder at the Shadows of his more respectable son. Pierce Nolan, the son, had become a pillar of the community, in spite of his father's illegal history.
Now that the family has sold the estate, a developer plans to turn it into another sprawling residential development, erasing more of Florida's history and beauty in the process. That is until a feisty preservationist asks the Cold Case Squad to get involved.
What they find shocks the city, halts the development and threatens to tarnish the Nolan family legacy.
In this novel Buchanan makes it clear that she loves Miami and scorns rampant development. While her critiques of overdevelopment within the novel are not as pointed as Carl Hiaasen's work, it does boost Miami from mere setting to almost a character in the story. And with the additional, personal mystery involving Detective Sam Stone, Buchanan uses history to her advantage.
SHADOWS can stand on its own as a separate novel, which isn't always true of books that are part of a series. It would be an enjoyable read even without all of the Montero background. For Buchanan fans, this latest novel is all the richer for bringing them closer to some of the players in Montero's mystery adventures and providing a window back to Florida's early days.
--- Reviewed by Bernadette Davis
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