Works by
Edna Buchanan
(Writer)
[1939 - ]

Fiction

Stand Alone

• Pulse (1998)
  Frank Douglas has everything to live for. But someone else had to die first.
  
  If Daniel Alexander had not committed suicide, Miami businessman Frank Douglas would never have lived to see his forty-fifth birthday. Now, with a donated heart beating strong and sure in his chest, Frank has been given a second chance-but no peace. Disturbed by nagging feelings of guilt and uncertainty, he feels an intense need to discover all he can about his mysterious late benefactor-a desire that is drawing Frank and the dead man's beautiful, enigmatic widow across a nation toward shocking revelations about Alexander's affairs...and deep into something corrupt and twisted and deadly. And suddenly the new life Frank Douglas has been granted is in serious peril, threatened by secrets, lies, human savagery and greed...and by the true dark nature of the organ that is now pumping the lifeblood through his body.

• Nobody Lives Forever (1990)
  Investigating the murders of his next-door neighbors, the latest victims in a serial killing spree, Miami homicide detective Rick Barrish is aided by two other detectives, one his former lover, in finding the culprit.

1. Contents under Pressure (1992)
   Britt is always out to prove that women are good crime reporters - despite her mother's dire warnings. Britt is convinced there's more to the story when a black ex-football star winds up dead after a car chase involving the police.

2. Miami: It's Murder (1994) -- Nominated for 1995 Edgar Award
   Ace Miami crime reporter Britt Montero investigates a series of bizarre deaths involving terminal sex, electrocution, and freshly poured concrete. And, with the help of a dying detective, Britt probes the unsolved murder of a small girl--which may implicate the front runner in the governor's race.

3. Suitable for Framing (1995)
   Britt has taken a clever young reporter under her wing. But Trish Tierney may be helping to make the sensational stories she's breaking. As Britt investigates, she finds herself the prime suspect in a horrifying murder and in the middle of a red-hot story that could cost her more than her career.

4. Act of Betrayal 1996)
   Britt finds the man who betrayed her father, as the most destructive hurricane in 50 years bears down on Miami. Just as her father was caught up in the whirlwind of revolution and freedom fighting 30 years earlier, Britt and those around her are caught up by the storm that shatters their lives and changes the face of South Florida forever.

5. Margin of Error (1997)
   Researching his role as an undercover government agent posing as a reporter takes a Hollywood movie star into Britt's life. But an obsessed fan stalks the star, and mysterious accidents, mishaps and deaths push the production over-budget. Who is trying to sabotage the film and murder the star? In a thrilling climax, he and Britt are cornered by killers in the dark bowels of the newspaper's vast press room, and the identity of the guilty party astounds them.

6. Garden of Evil (1999)
   It begins with Buchanan’s usual satisfying formula - Britt is contacted by an aging beauty queen who believes her life is in danger, while up near Florida’s Panhandle a possible female serial killer is working her way downstate, leaving a wake of dead males with their pants down and a red lipstick imprint on their cheeks. As The Kiss-Me Killer moves South, so does Buchanan’s formula, to the point where the storyline becomes quite singular, ending with a nihilistic note that goes far beyond the requisite dose of cynicism that makes these novels so realistic.

7. You Only Die Twice (2001)
   What was the nude, recently slain body of Kaithlin Jordan doing spoiling the pristine turquoise waters of Miami Beach - especially when the dead socialite's convicted killer husband is sitting on Death Row for having murdered her...ten years ago! Reporter Britt Montero lives for this kind of story. But she may die for this one as well. Because each question raises many others - and every hard-won answer reveals secret passions and explosive truths that could doom an overly inquisitive journalist with a tendency to leap before she looks.

8. The Ice Maiden (2002)
   A chance encounter with a stranger changes the life of reporter Britt Montero forever. The encounter is at Miami's morgue, where the unidentified stranger lies dead. His unusual old scars capture her curiosity--the dead man clearly had a tale to tell. This thief, who was accidentally electrocuted, may be the key that unlocks the long-sought secrets of a sensational cold murder mystery unsolved for more than fourteen years.

9. Love Kills (2007)
   "Where the hell is Britt Montero?"
   
   So says Sgt. Craig Burch of Miami's Cold Case Squad at the end of the first chapter of Edna Buchanan's new novel, Love Kills. So have readers been wondering since reporter Britt Montero vanished after her lover, homicide cop Kendall McDonald, was killed three books ago in Buchanan's The Ice Maiden.
   
   When a bulldozer in the Everglades unearths the skull of an infamous kidnapper, the Cold Case Squad is brought in to investigate. Britt was the last person to see him alive, and the detectives have questions only she can answer.
   
   On a remote desert island where she has sought solace, Montero finds a camera on an isolated beach. The film inside yields photos of a happy young couple on their honeymoon. Soon after, Britt is shocked to learn the newlyweds were lost at sea.
   
   When only the groom is rescued, the connection between the reporter and the new widower astonishes her -- and Britt is even more astonished when she finds out the truth. Ultimately, her search for the bridegroom's secrets and the Cold Case Squad's search for the kidnapper's killer collide.
   
   Britt finds herself desperate and in danger, and only one person can help -- Cold Case Squad Lt. K. C. Riley, McDonald's childhood sweetheart. The two women must confront their differences in order to survive and to protect the life of someone they both care about deeply.

10. Legally Dead (August 11, 2009 release)

• Legally Dead  (August 11, 2009 release)
  U.S. Marshal Michael Venturi of the Witness Protection Program relocates a mobster, now a government witness, to a small rural town after creating a new identity for him. The man proves to be a monster unleashed on an unsuspecting community. The results are tragic. To make amends Venturi leaves the Marshals Service and assembles a team of close confidants to secretly create new identities for innocent men and women whose lives have been ruined through no fault of their own -- people who really deserve fresh starts in new lives. But before they are relocated and reborn, each must change a lifetime of habits and actually become someone else, with new traits, tastes, and personalities.
  
  And before being declared "legally dead" -- they have to die. The result is a combination of Extreme Makeover, Mission Impossible, and CSI -- the last in reverse. In these "deaths," some of them spectacular, phony forensics must be created to fit the "facts" and fool the experts.
  
  His fascinating experiment works -- for a time. But as Venturi continues to relocate the deserving, evil begins to stalk Venturi and his legally dead clients.
  
  Soon one is dead.
  
  Really dead.
  
  Are the relentless killers from his own past, or was one of his clients not so innocent after all? His own loved ones are now targets because of his attempts to atone for a tragedy that haunts him.
  
  In a desperate race to protect those he has relocated, Venturi must call upon his former training in both the U.S. Marines Force Recon and the Marshals Service, as he is hunted by police, prosecutors, ruthless killers, and his own former federal colleagues.

Non-fiction

• Never Let Them See You Cry: More from Miami, America's Hottest Beat (1992)
  A street-smart expose of the Miami crime scene recalls tragic and amusing tales of murdered millionaires, preschool witnesses, walking corpses, and wandering fowl.

• Vice: Life and Death on the Streets of Miami (1992)

• The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America's Hottest Beat (1987)

• Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder: From The Personal Account of Robert Frederick Carr III (1979)

Other

• Naked Came the Manatee (1996)
  In South Florida, everyone wants to get a head. But not just any head. A very famous human head--severed and snugged away in a cryonic container. A head that could spark a revolution and change the course of history.
  
  Everybody wants a piece of the noggin: rotund gangster Big Joey G., a 102-year-old environmentalist, hard-boiled Miami reporter Britt Montero, lawyer Jake Lassiter, and a would-be dictator in exile--with ex-president Jimmy Carter and a lovable manatee named Booger thrown in for good measure.
  
  With bodies piling up it's anybody's guess what will happen from one chapter to the next, as an all-star line-up of Florida's finest writers take turns at taking this outrageously original novel to the limit--and beyond.