Customer Reviews

Love Kills (Britt Montero Mysteries)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the first Britt Montero book I have read, and I found it a bit confusing since I didn't know any of the characters or their backstories. The author didn't do enough to explain their relationships with Britt, so I had no idea who was important to her and who was not. In the end it didn't matter too much because she didn't listen to any of them, but it would have been nice to know whether this was her normal behavior or was due to "hormones", as she kept insisting. Most pregnant women would not have behaved as she did.
If I put the pregnancy aside, the rest of the story was pretty good. Liked the was Buchanan wove the three sub-plots together, though I thought the denouement of each segment was a bit too abrupt. The child snatcher ending was anti-climctic, though the twist in the serial killer more than made up for it. However, the whole BOOK had no ending, and I'm not a fan of that type of cliff-hanger. I'll have to go back and read some of the earlier books before I decide whether I want to wait for the next Britt Montero.

Reviewed by: Renee S. N.Y.C.

About an hour ago I finished reading this new novel and Ms. Buchanan has surely outdone herself this time! There are some characters in the novel I didn't trust, and rightfully so, but never would have guessed the reasons WHY I shouldn't have trusted them! I feel that this ranks among Buchanan's best fiction, alongside The Ice Maiden and Act of Betrayel, among others. We've had to wait four long years for another Britt novel, but here she is back, and with the guys from the Cold Case Squad too. The two sets of characters mesh fine together in this one novel.

I've been lucky enough to meet Ms. Buchanan (twice) and it's nice to see how down-to-earth and friendly she is to her fans. She signed several books for my friends and myself and chatted with us for quite a while.

Enough said, go out and read this book already!

In Edna Buchanan's "Love Kills," Miami-based crime reporter Britt Montero is hurting. Her lover, homicide cop Kendell McDonald, has died and Britt has been living on a remote island, grieving and licking her wounds. One day, Britt's friend, Lottie Dane, unexpectedly shows up and gives Britt a dose of tough love. She hounds Britt to come to terms with the past, get back to work, and move on with her life. Since Montero has run out of money anyway, she decides to ask for her old job back at the Miami News.

Waiting in Britt's mailbox are numerous messages from the Cold Case Squad. It seems that the body of Spencer York, known as the "Custody Crusader," has been found buried in a Florida construction site. Montero was well acquainted with York, who had been a publicity hound with an enormous ego. He was also a misogynist, who considered all divorced mothers to be "greedy sluts" and bad parents. York took it upon himself to balance the scales of justice by snatching hundreds of children from their divorced mothers and delivering the kids to their fathers. During his career, he abducted more than two hundred children. Spencer York was "rude, crude, and obnoxious," and many people wanted him dead, but who actually shot him in the back of the head?

In addition, Britt gets up close and personal with a handsome and slick Lothario who loves 'em and leaves 'em--dead. His heavily insured and extremely gullible wives invariably get into accidents; they fall, drown, break their necks, and generally fail to return from their honeymoons in one piece. Britt takes it upon herself to stop this sociopath before he claims more victims.

The first half of "Love Kills" is terrific. Britt is a lively and effervescent character who immediately gains the reader's empathy. She is a loose cannon--a courageous, impulsive, and determined newswoman who is determined to get her story, even if it means disobeying orders and endangering her life in the process. Buchanan's style is breezy, the mystery is suspenseful, and the dialogue is brisk and amusing. Britt is on uneasy terms with Cold Case Squad lieutenant Kathleen Constance Riley, who was Kendell McDonald's high school sweetheart and still resents Britt for taking him away from her. "Love Kills" would have been a quintessential recommended beach read except for the off-the-wall conclusion, in which Buchanan bypasses logic in the interest of excitement and surprise. However, if you are willing to suspend your disbelief, you will find this a diverting enough summer thriller about the price women pay when they marry Mr. Wrong.

In this latest suspense novel, Edna Buchanan weaves two of her best into an intricate storyline. I love the Britt Montero series and the Cold Case Squad. This novel attempts to combine both and succeeds. Although the ending leaves you hanging a bit, it was an enjoyable read. I cannot wait until the next book by the talented Ms. Buchanan. Keep 'em coming!

As a native Miamian and former journalist, I ration my Edna Buchanan, always keeping at least one of her thrillers unread. When I discovered "Love Kills" on a sale table lately, I snapped it up. The set-up is promising: A construction crew discovers a buried body on the edge of the Everglades. The Miami-Dade Cold Case Squad is summoned and the body soon identified as that of a thuggish kidnapper who specialized in snatching children from the hands of mothers who've fled joint-custody agreements, returning the tots to their bereft fathers for hefty fees. Britt Montero, crack crime reporter for the Miami News, is believed to be the least person to have seen the "Custody Crusader" alive. But where is Britt?

Britt, along with photographer-sidekick Lottie Dane, is surfing on a remote Bahamas island, mourning her fiancée, police Major Kendall McDonald, killed while attempting to rescue a child threatened by a psychotic father separated from a hardworking mother. (Do you see a pattern here?) On the beach, the women discover a disposable, waterproof camera with a few shots unsnapped, which they use to document their own vacation. Most of the images contained in the camera turn out to be the record of a honeymooning couple believed lost at sea in a boating accident. But when the grieving husband turns up alive, clinging to a life raft, Britt - pregnant, out of work, broke and back in Miami - starts making calls, turns in first-class articles on both stories and allows her bossy mother to dress her in pregnancy couture. The bereft husband, a combination of looks, smarts and empathy not much short of George Clooney's screen presence, turns out to be a serial marrying man, with five or six known, fully-insured, super-talented wives all dead due to terrible accidents during glamorous honeymoons. Britt interviews the brides' devastated parents and ex-boyfriends. So far so good.

But then it all goes smash. Britt and Cold Case Squad commander K.C. ("Kathy") Riley, her bitter enemy and bested rival for the dead McDonald's affections, end up mucking around in a remote Alaska forest, attempting to bring the lying bridegroom to justice, and performing feats of foolhardy daring-do that not even the most credulous teenage male movie fan would swallow.

A desk editor on the Miami News would have sent this conclusion back for rewrites.

This is another great Britt Montero book but - just a warning - the book ends abruptly with no ending to the series. This is the last book in the series with no resolution to how Britt or her baby makes out or how the series ends! The story just cuts off with no consideration of her character or faithful readers. I am very disappointed and will never read another one of the author's books for fear of such abuse again.

TEASER
A teaser is a loathsome device designed to snare bookstore browsers with up front action, but which usually has the effect of confusing and often misleading the reader. In this teaser, a land clearing crew in the Miami area discovers a body. The teaser is at least in time sequence (not a flashback or flash-ahead), and relevant to a secondary storyline.

THE SETUP
While mourning MacDonald's death (in the previous novel, "Ice Maidens) on one of the Bahamian Out Islands, Brit Montero (reporter for the Miami News) finds a disposable camera containing photographs of a newlywed couple. When she returns to Miami, she discovers that the couple are missing at sea, but the groom, Marsh Holt, survives.

In the secondary storyline, the corpse found in the teaser turns out to be that of a "father's rights" advocate, who specialized in kidnapping children from their mothers for their fathers.

CAVEATS--contains spoilers
The first chapter (after the teaser) is in first person, with the speaker unidentified. Fans of the series will know that the speaker is Britt Montero, but new readers will be hopelessly confused.

The boat in question was said to have been caught in a squall, with lobster and crab traps in the water. In the Bahamas, that implies less than 20-30 feet of water, but the boat is described more than once as "lost in 700 fathoms of water". That happens to be possible in the Bahamas, with the explanation that the boat was blown 1/4-mile off the shelf by the storm--but no such explanation, or any other, is offered.

Much of the main story suffers serious implausibilities. Readers constantly want to tell Brit "Don't do that you idiot" or "You shoulda said..." and so forth. To some extent it is satisfying to be smarter than the hero, but Brit's incorruptible stupidity becomes tiresome.

The repeated story of MacDonald's death, which most reviews consider a major flaw in the previous novel, only gets worse in the retelling.

THE VERDICT
Despite the caveats above, "Love Kills" has all you could want from a good mystery: relatively few, but interesting, likable characters, a vivid setting, a fast-paced easy to follow plot, a good mystery with plenty of clues, surprising twists, even romance of a sort. A great read.

Wow, what a lame book. I've read many Britt Monteros before, and I remember them being tight, smart police procedurals. This time, we've got a whiny pregnant woman (oh, gosh, the whole pregnant woman thing always being hungry with oversized ankles has been done so many times before!) who goes off on her own throughout the country. By the end, I was just skimming page after page because the story was so farcical. If this were a Stephanie Plum by Janet Evanovich, it might have been funny. But when you've come to expect a certain level of class and smarts, making your character dumb and whiny is disappointing.

It wasn't that bad as far as Britt Montero books go, but the ending- the book just stopped! I wouldn't even call it a cliffhanger! It was as if she only had so many pages to write on and when she came to the last one she just stopped writing! Way too many unanswered questions and that is very unlike her. It was a frustrating way to end a book.

I've been reading Edna Buchanan's Britt Montero novels for many years, but this one really disappointed me. Britt's on the trail of a serial killer, traveling between Miami, Louisiana, Minnesota and Alaska, while she is pregnant with her dead lover's baby. And that's the part that disappointed the most. She puts herself through rainstorms, floods, repeated physical risks and multiple plane rides in pursuit of her quarry, with apparently little or no thought for the safety of the baby she's carrying! Perhaps the author has never had any children; that's the only excuse for that particular aspect of this story. As I read the story, I found myself shouting out loud, "Are you out of your mind?"

And here's where the Mixed Bag comes in. Chapters focusing on Britt's adventures are interspersed with chapters about the Cold Case Squad and their search for the murderer of a child custody kidnapper, a perfectly vile individual who richly deserved his fate. I don't even know if the Miami Police Dept. has a Cold Case Squad, but if they do, they should be up in arms about the way members of their dept. are portrayed. One chapter read like a Keystone Cops comedy. If the Miami Police never speak to Edna Buchanan again, no one will blame them after reading this book!