Buchanan's 'Shadows' deserves the spotlight

Edna Buchanan wears a gold necklace that spells out "I Love Miami." And as the crime rate rises with the Miami temperature, mystery fans love Buchanan.

"Shadows," her 15th suspense novel since leaving the police beat on the Miami Herald with a Pulitzer Prize for reporting, brings the Cold Case Squad to a dilapidated waterfront mansion that hasn't been occupied since a popular former mayor was gunned down in its doorway decades ago.

The never-solved case is reopened when an intrepid and pretty preservationist tries to prevent a developer from bulldozing Shadows, the creepy mansion moldering in the Miami sun, to erect high-rise luxury apartments whose selling prices start at $2 million.

To get her off their backs, Cold Case Squad detectives, led by the hard-nosed and hard-driving Lt. K.C. Riley, reluctantly inspect what's left of Shadows, built by a colorful Prohibition rumrunner. In a chilling scene worthy of Hitchcock's cameras, they bust open a padlocked wooden chest in the dank, cobweb-shrouded cellar.

Detective Sam Stone probes with his flashlight and, as Buchanan picks up the story, "the light spilled inside, exposing a row of small, neatly wrapped bundles. One was disturbed. From it protruded a tiny, dark, and shriveled human hand."

But wait. Buchanan's Miami didn't get to be the homicide capital of the world with just one tiny mummified body. There are seven of them, wrapped in cloth and old newspapers, ranging in age from newborn to 6 months.

Is there a connection here with the murder of the ex-mayor, who had three good-looking daughters? Could they have been, well, the mommies of these mummies?

Read on. How can you stop as Buchanan serves up another South Beach diet of simmering sex and cold-blooded murder under a scorching semitropical sun?

Crime-scene tapes hold back the bulldozers as the Cold Case Squad bulldozes the past with the help of the city morgue at One Bob Hope Road, where high-tech forensics, including DNA testing, laser computers, digital cameras and blood-spatter analysis, restore life to old, cold cases.

There's no use rounding up the usual suspects. In Buchanan's Miami, they are all unusual: paid party girls, a pouting Peeping Tom, a blackmailer pervert using date-rape drugs to lure coeds into making porn films, a shady lady doctor dealing in backdoor abortions and adoptions, and a lover who drags his beloved about by the hair.

Buchanan, while covering 3,000 homicides during 18 years on the police beat, stored away bizarre characters and weird happenings to be recycled later in novels.

There's a riveting reality about her unreal world of freaks and felons, perps and victims that any Cold Case detective worth his badge could DNA-test right back to some fading police blotter.

No wonder the Chamber of Commerce went bonkers when a billboard near the causeway advertised an earlier Buchanan thriller "Miami, It's Murder." And it still is, as "Shadows" so vividly, well maybe mortally, testifies.

Miami's maven of mystery and murder just keeps getting better. She knows the territory and the latest technology to probe it.