THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603180182
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Short : 38 lines
ACT OF BETRAYAL
EDNA BUCHANAN
Hyperion. 292 pp. $21.95.
Edna Buchanan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dynamo late of The Miami Herald, continues to take no prisoners in her latest mystery featuring ace crime reporter Britt Montero, Act of Betrayal.
In this installment, Buchanan's gritty and gutsy alter ego chases after a car bomber, Cuban guerrillas and a serial killer of adolescent boys - while sweating out another South Florida summer - before she gets caught up in a monster of a hurricane.
Sympathetic with Miami's exiles, Buchanan tells a story of building intrigue and in-fighting as Castro's regime weakens, its end at last in sight. But the heart of the novel is not the freedom fighters. It is Britt's Cuban past, buried with a father who was executed by a Castro firing squad when she was 3. Though Britt has appeal, her personal quest unfolds melodramatically and predictably.
Buchanan's focus is uncharacteristically slow to emerge here, and her narration is loose and sometimes unengaging. Her fiction has never had the fascination or the command of her true-crime memoirs (The Corpse Had a Familiar Face). Act of Betrayal, which strays often from Britt's crime-beat reporting, is her weakest yet. by CNB