THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 28, 1995 TAG: 9502280042
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
AFTER FOUR STARTS out of the gate, Edna Buchanan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning racehorse late of The Miami Herald, now sets a familiar pace. The Jerry Lee Lewis of detective novelists, she leaves others in the field breathless.
It's the same nonstop pace Buchanan set as a gritty, tireless, detail-obsessed, adrenalin-driven police reporter. Her action is ridiculously jam-packed; her time for reflection (say what?) ridiculously short. The spot-news-breaking Buchanan seeks in-the-street thrills, spills, kills and chills.
But she is not without conscience or compassion. Driving her relentless action is her equally relentless demand for responsive and responsible justice.
Having ridden shotgun with this Miami champion through her fast, furious and fascinating memoirs (``The Corpse Had a Familiar Face,'' ``Nobody Lives Forever'') and all of her (progressively improving) novels, I have developed an affection for the Buchanan gallop. I no longer recoil at intrusions of happenstance and coincidence. (There are many.) I no longer object to her transparent episodic plotting. (There are few surprises.) I just sit back and enjoy the ride.
I am happy to report that ``Suitable for Framing'' (Hyperion, $21.95), the third in Buchanan's Britt Montero series, is an entertaining turn around the track.
Montero, the scrappy, self-deprecating, blond, Cuban-American, Miami News police reporter who debuted in ``Contents Under Pressure'' and became more her own woman - and less Buchanan's alter ego - in ``Miami, It's Murder,'' again leads and follows a succession of hair-flying chases on her beat.
A year older than in the previous novel, 32-year-old Britt seems more mature and confident, less hungry for recognition, even softer. All of which suggests that the next Montero installment will attend more to her personal life, or lack thereof.
This time out, the ever-topical Buchanan focuses on carjackings, their seemingly random victims and their perpetrators - an assortment of streetwise teenagers. One particularly ruthless perp, nicknamed ``FMJ'' for ``Full Metal Jacket,'' enjoys knee-capping the drivers he dispossesses.
Britt's reportage and her police sources take her into the inner workings of the profitable auto-theft business - with Buchanan sprinkling fast facts (e.g., A car is stolen every 19 seconds in this country.) along the way - and into the life of Howie, an engaging 15-year-old dropout with a future if he can survive his criminal present.
Also key to the action is Britt's relationship with Trish Tierney, a 26-year-old newcomer to the newspaper library staff who harbors grander ambitions, as well as a suspicious past. Well aware that successful newswomen, such as her disloyal editor Gretchen, do not always reach out to younger women coming up, Montero consciously decides to help promote Trish's career. Her reward for such principled selflessness is a feminist's nightmare-come-true, not unlike Michael Crichton's take on sexual harassment run amok in ``Disclosure.''
Though she is becoming more adept at characterization, Buchanan portrays Trish as little more than a shadow. She exists to present an ``issue'' about women in the work place and to complicate the plot, but not to evoke an emotional response. The resolution of the ``Trish problem'' is unsatisfying.
Buchanan's forte continues to be her reporting of daily crime happenings, which include in ``Suitable for Framing'' the disappearance of an Alzheimer's patient; the suicide of a hotline caller; the ``kidnapping'' of a mentally retarded teenager's twin infants; and the destruction of a condemned building in which homeless people lived.
Like Britt, I feast on this menu of urban mayhem. Lucky for me, she does the exhaustive legwork while I just wait, breathlessly, to be served.
A familiar pace, indeed. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is book editor for The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. ILLUSTRATION: ``Suitable for Framing'' is the third Britt Montero adventure.
by CNB