Terrific book if you didn't need the last 20 percent

Love Kills is Edna Buchanan's ninth Britt Montero mystery. She should have known better.

Buchanan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter who spent eighteen years on the Miami Herald as a crime reporter, covering over 5,000 violent deaths, some 3,000 of which reportedly were homicides, or about three a week. She took a one-year leave of absence from the Herald in 1988 to write her first novel, Nobody Lives Forever. Published in 1990, the thriller was nominated for an Edgar Award and later became a television movie of the week. In 1992, she published her popular Britt Montero series with Contents Under Pressure. Britt, like Buchanan herself when she was a reporter, sleeps with a police scanner by her bedside and never lets go of a good story, and Love Kills is a good story gone bad.

After a Prologue in which a construction crew uncovers a decomposed body, a victim obviously murdered. Although the Cold Case Squad has a good idea of the victim's identity, Buchanan does share it with the reader. We do learn the victim's wallet contains a card which had Britt's name and phone number.

The book proper begins with Britt herself as the first person narrator. She and a friend are on a small, unnamed Caribbean island. Britt, a reporter on the Miami News, and the friend, a photographer from the paper, find an intact camera washed up on the beach and shoot the last three frames on the roll. Britt is recovering from a trauma I assume occurred in the last book. This is the first Edna Buchanan I've read, and she handles this background skillfully. You need not have read the series to understand Love Kills. Vacation over, the women return to Miami and to work.

The dead man we now learn was Spencer Nathan York, America's most active kidnapper. "A hired gun for divorced fathers, he called himself the Custody Crusader and was a combative foe of what he described as a growing tide of feminism that had swept over the family courts, depriving fathers of their rights." Britt had interviewed York and—separately—the parents of a child he kidnapped in an unusually brutal snatching incident. Many people had good reason to hate York, and in alternate, third-person point of view sections of the book we follow the cold case detectives as they work.

The pictures on the recovered camera are shots of a blissful young couple on their honeymoon on a rented yacht. It takes almost no work to establish who they are and their tragic story. There was fire and explosion on the boat, which sank, killing the wife, and leaving the husband adrift to be rescued by the Coast Guard. Dreadful, but accidents happen.

Britt begins digging. Marsh Holt had swept his bride off her feet although endeared himself to her parents, who came to see him the son they never had. After a short romance and engagement the happy couple took off for their dream honeymoon.

Except. 

A short while later, the Coast Guard happens to intercept drug runners and Britt realizes that the smuggler's boat is the is one that supposedly sank with the new bride. And Holt has disappeared, leaving no forwarding address.

Which is not much of a challenge to a hot shot reporter like Britt Montero. In short order she establishes that Holt had been married before. And all three brides died in unfortunate accidents on their honeymoon. Holt is not the grieving bridegroom Britt had interviewed before he left Miami and disappeared, but an exceptionally clever and heartless serial killer. 

I cannot think of another book in which I was so engaged for the first 80 percent and wanted to throw across the room in the last 20. Buchanan's writing is lively, the dialogue sparkles, the twists—in the first 80 percent—terrific. We learn only after 50 pages of Britt's narration that she's pregnant—a surprise, but one that works. There's an exciting set piece in which the cold case detectives chase a fugitive around Miami that reminded me of Carl Hiaasen.

What doesn't work (for me at least) is Britt's winding up in a cabin in Alaska trying to rescue Holt's latest conquest in partnership with—as she learns too late—Holt's male partner and true love and being rescued at the last minute by a female Miami police captain who had also been the lover of the father of Britt's child. Is all that clear? In the book it's clear but also preposterous. 

I can imagine that one of the challenges of using your reporter's background and war stories in fiction is that often what really happens—the coincidences, the mistakes, the wrong turns—in real life sound preposterous in fiction. Perhaps Britt could have connected with and unknowingly working with Holt's partner, and perhaps she could have followed Holt and his most recent bride to Alaska on the paper's credit card. But I don't believe it.