Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 8, 1990                   TAG: 9004110021
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by MIKE HUDSON
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FIRST NOVEL LOOKS AT MURDER IN MIAMI NOBODY LIVES FOREVER. EDNA BUCHANAN.

The first page of Edna Buchanan's first novel includes the shotgunning of an Avon Lady, a running gun battle with machine pistols along Sunshine Turnpike, a domestic dispute that ends with the accidental shooting of a bystander and several other assorted acts of destruction.

The dust cover notes that Buchanan has covered more than 5,000 violent deaths - 3,000 of them murders - in her 18 years as The Miami Herald's police reporter. In "Nobody Lives Forever," Buchanan lives up to her billing as the Queen of Crime.

The random spree of mayhem that begins the novel mirrors her recent non-fiction book, "The Corpse Had A Familiar Face," an autobiographical look at crime and craziness in South Florida.

But the novel quickly settles into more focused mayhem - a crime spree by a troubled young woman, Laurel, who has multiple personalities that include a teddy-bear-hugging little girl named Jennifer and a murderous male named Alex.

The book turns on the coincidence that the killer happens to be the live-in girlfriend of a Miami homicide detective, who (still another coincidence) is assigned to investigate the killings. I'm not spoiling the plot here, because Buchanan lays all this out in the first several pages. Revealing the killer so early breaks the traditional crime-fiction rule of hiding the villain until the end. But Buchanan keeps the story moving by sprinkling gruesome little tidbits throughout - such as the drug dealers who kidnap a dead associate from the local morgue and use a Ginzu knife to retrieve a fortune in cocaine stashed in his intestines.

Buchanan's lengthy italicized trips inside the female killer's mind are sometimes distracting, perhaps because they are so disturbing. And all the coincidences that hold the story together - including the one sets up the ending - are a bit much.

But I can't complain. I started reading about 6 p.m. on a Friday, and hardly took a break until I finished it, 241 pages and uncounted homicides later, at 5 a.m. that Sunday. And, yes, page 241 includes at least one killing.