Miami, Florida - one of America's most exotic and dangerous cities - is journalist Edna Buchanan's beat. In the widely acclaimed The Corpse Had a Familiar Face and Never Let Them See You Cry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Miami Herald reporter took her readers through the dark underbelly of the Sunshine State, where murder, drugs, and corruption are as common as sand on the beaches. Now, Buchanan brings her years of hard-won experience, her unflinching eye, and her warm and witty prose style to bear in her powerful new novel. In Contents Under Pressure, she combines the best ingredients of suspense writing - seat-of-the-pants action, an intelligent and beautiful protagonist, and a complicated murder - and heats them up under a Miami sun for a thrillingly combustible outcome. Britt Montero is a crime reporter for a major Miami newspaper, and an oddity in a man's domain - a blonde, green-eyed Cuban-American woman tough enough to investigate even the most terrifying of homicides, but with a tender spot for the city's underdogs. The latest report to come in seems fairly cut and dried: several cops on the midnight shift chase a black motorist, and the fleeing man, a former football hero, winds up dead. However, as Britt begins her story on the accident, she discovers a number of disturbing facts about that night. Despite warnings to stay away, she starts to investigate what really happened - taking the reader from the high-intensity atmosphere of the newsroom to riding on the midnight beat with the cops, to the outraged black community that threatens to erupt into violence. Along the way she consorts with her own network of contacts, both solid citizens and nefarious nightbirds - and takes on aforbidden lover, a man she may not be able to trust. As the city explodes in a riot, Britt is caught up in events that bring the novel to a heart-shuddering climax. Contents Under Pressure is an immensely satisfying read, one that will leave its audience craving more.
A fictionalized version of the McDuffie riots, written by the Miami reporter who covered the case that led up to those riots. It would be fascinating to hear from Edna Buchanan about how she's been reading coverage of police-involved shootings in recent years, and about whether she'd cover those cases any differently.
