Cold Case Squad

Rating:
Summary: A fun and interesting read...
Review: Buchanan's book is a quick read, but not a shallow one. The characters are all interesting and the mysteries (yes, plural) are interesting. There are no absurd scenes where the killer explains it all...just good dectective work. At times she seems a bit like other Miami authors with bizarre car chases or odd family histories, but overall the book works. I have not read the Britt Montero mysteries, but perhaps these are not entirely new characters to those fans. However, as a stand alone, this is a good solid mystery.

Rating:
Summary: Scattered characterizations mar story
Review: Edna Buchanan has forsaken her long-time series star, crime reporter Britt Montero, to take the plunge with a McBain-like team of Miami cops, the Cold Case squad (also featured in "The Ice Maiden"). Trouble is, she doesn't write like McBain. The view-shifting is sometimes awkward and Montero's insight, curiosity, impulsiveness and personal problems are parceled out to a crowd.

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.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing Plot with Confusing Character Development
Review: Ms. Buchanan has written a book that clearly makes it out of the infield as a single. Based on the plot, Cold Case Squad could have been a home run. If Ms. Buchanan decides to continue this book as a series, I predict that the next book will be much more successful.

Each of the members of the cold case squad has a secret pain which is well known to the members of the squad . . . but kept from the reader until later in the book. Presumably, the pain must have been revealed in The Ice Maiden. As a result, a lot of the references are mysterious until the pains are disclosed later in the book. If the sources of that pain had been revealed sooner in this book, Cold Case Squad would have worked a lot better. Instead, there's a false feeling about the story telling. Now that I know what the secret pains are, the next book will be easier for me to follow.

As a result, you may want to consider reading The Ice Maiden before this book.

As the story opens, we are given a flash back into an old crime. Three deaths occur in a short period of time, but we don't know if they are all connected or not.

Moving forward to the present, a widow, April Terrell, comes into the cold case squad complaining that she keeps seeing someone who reminds her of her dead husband, who died 12 years earlier in an accident. Lieutenant K.C. Riley impulsively pulls her squad off of their current cases to crash on this one as a suspected homicide. Why? You'll find out before the book ends. But the investigation is an intriguing police procedural.

In the background, the detectives make headway in finding a serial killer who has been following a bizarre ritual. I found this part of the story the most satisfying.

One of the attractive parts of the plot is that it relies on the benefit of fresh perspectives on old problems to solve the cases. I thought that that approach was both realistic and interesting.

The character development of the squad leaves something to be desired, but their ascribed backgrounds are certainly colorful.

Good luck with the next book, Ms. Buchanan!

Rating:
Summary: This may well be Buchanan's best work to date
Review: The title THE CORPSE HAD A FAMILIAR FACE is interchangeable with its author, Edna Buchanan. Buchanan became a household name as a result of that work, and despite subsequently publishing a succession of well-written and imaginative crime novels, CORPSE remains her best-known work. That may change with the publication of COLD CASE SQUAD.

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

Rating:
Summary: Welcome to the Cold Case Squad
Review: With shades of the 87th Precinct, the Cold Case Squad has a wonderful cast of characters with diverse pasts and lives yet working well together as a team. There is excellent dialogue, humor and descriptions of Miami, but balanced with interesting procedure and good suspense. While it helps to have read "The Ice Maiden," it's not completely necessary as this is a wonderful book on it's own and I hope to see a lot more of the Cold Case Squad.

Rating:
Summary: action-filled exciting police procedural
Review: With the advent of computer databases, the internet, DNA testing and other advances in technology and science, crimes that couldn't be solved a decade ago might be resolved today. In Miami, the COLD CASE SQUAD consists of only four people but they are working on two cases using new investigative techniques and although they haven't solved them they have more information that could lead to identifying the killers.

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

Rating:
Summary: action-filled exciting police procedural
Review: With the advent of computer databases, the internet, DNA testing and other advances in technology and science, crimes that couldn't be solved a decade ago might be resolved today. In Miami, the COLD CASE SQUAD consists of only four people but they are working on two cases using new investigative techniques and although they haven't solved them they have more information that could lead to identifying the killers.

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