Edna Buchanan Shadows

Shadows

Edna Buchanan

In Miami preservationist Kiki Courtelis visits the police department's Cold Case Squad to investigate the murder of 1950s city Mayor Pierce Nolan in front of his home in 1961. Kiki informs the cops that if they fail to act, the most famous unsolved case in the state will remain that way forever because developers have bulldozers ready to tear down Nolan's home the Shadows. She also admits that the Cold Case Squad is her last hope to save the elegant but abandoned 1920s style house from progress.

Sergeant Burch reluctantly leads his team on a search of the premises, but is stunned when they find a box containing the remains of seven babies that died four decades ago. DNA testing proves that Pierce sired none of the infants.

While much of the squad is morbidly fascinated with the infanticide, Police Officer Sam Stone works a more personal cold case, the murders of his parents in 1987. He is astonished to learn that the cop Ray Glover, who informed him and his grandmother that his parents were murdered, died not long afterward in an accident.

Mindful in positive ways of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct, the two prime subplot cases never intersect yet both grips the audience for differing reasons. Readers like most of the cold case squad and the city will be ghoulishly mesmerized by the murders of the former mayor and the babies; on the other hand the audience and the city will empathize with Sam's need for closure as his inquiries lead towards a conspiratorial cover-up by Miamians, but who and why appears just out of reach. Edna Buchanan writes a terrific police procedural.

Simon & Schuster, Jul 2005, $24.00, 272 pp.

ISBN: 0743250559

Harriet Klausner