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review

Edna Buchanan introduces a new sleuth who protects crime victims in 'Legally Dead'

Legally Dead

by Edna Buchanan

Simon & Schuster / 359 pages / $26

Edna Buchanan knows crime. During her 18 years heading the police beat for the Miami Herald, she won a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award for lifetime achievement in journalism.

When she retired from reporting and took up mystery writing, critical acclaim followed.

Among her 17 books, Buchanan has published eight novels in the Britt Montero series. Montero, a Cuban-American reporter for a Miami newspaper, is 32 and single. Her role model is her father, killed by one of Castro's firing squads when Montero was 3. Montero is prone to finding trouble, which is never difficult in the gritty, mob-infested world of Miami.

In her latest mystery, Legally Dead , Buchanan introduces a new detective who couldn't be more different from the amateur Montero, except that his ethos totally mirrors the reporter's: His focus is the victims of crimes, not the perpetrators.

It wasn't always that way. As a U.S. marshal for the Witness Protection Program, Michael Venturi relocated criminals - until Gino Salvi. What turns out to be Venturi's last relocation changes his life.

Venturi reluctantly relocates Salvi, a witness in a union corruption case, to a small town in rural New Hampshire. Salvi is more than a mobster-turned-witness for the government. He's a dangerous pedophile with a fatal predilection for little girls. Salvi's new identity allows him entree into a new community with horrifying consequences: He rapes and murders two children.

Sickened by the dreadful crimes that Venturi had predicted, he exacts his revenge on Salvi.

Venturi also plans to exact revenge on the feds, but gets fired first, scapegoated in the disastrous aftermath of the Salvi debacle.

Venturi devises a new plan for freelance justice and turns to his closest friend and former Marine recon buddy, Danny Trado, a CIA operative with a funeral home cover in Miami's Little Havana.

Together with Trado, Venturi marshals his forces - a coterie of close friends and colleagues who want what he wants: to help the victims, not the criminals. With his furtive team, Venturi sets up his own witness protection program, this time for the innocent. He works to forge new identities for men and women who have been devastated by circumstances beyond their control - a NASA scientist, a judge, a couple wrongly accused of a terrible crime and others.