Britt Montero
7 primary works • 8 total works
Book 1
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.
Book 2
The tough Cuban-American crime reporter, Britt Montero, is back and investigating a series of bizarre deaths. With a dying detective as her friend and source, Britt probes the unsolved sex murder of a small girl which may implicate the rich and powerful front-runner in the governor's race.
Book 3
Book 4
A fatal bomb blast propels Miami News police reporter Britt Montero into the story of her life, as deadly secrets and betrayals from the past sweep into Miami on the winds of a killer storm. More than one evil prowls the sweltering city. When Britt reports the story of a missing teenager, she uncovers a frightening pattern of identical cases. As Britt probes the baffling case, an old mystery reopens personal wounds. Britt has always felt simpatico with the father she never knew - who was executed by a Castro firing squad when she was only three - and bewildered by her mother's bitter silence about the man who allowed the dream of a free Cuba to become a fatal obsession. Now, as the Castro regime weakens and falters at last, as intrigue and politicking build to a fever pitch throughout Miami's exile community, Britt meets two men who knew her father well. Both know the shocking secret history of her parents' past. Through them, Britt learns that her father left an explosive prison diary naming the traitor who betrayed him. Rumor says the long-sought diary has now arrived in Miami, in the possession of a rafter, a balsero, one of the thousands who risked their lives braving the sharkinfested waters of the Florida straits to reach freedom. Suddenly everyone wants the diary, and everyone who acquires it is marked for murder. As the cold trail of the missing boys heats up and Britt seeks her father's diary in order to find the man responsible for his death, the most destructive hurricane in fifty years bears down on Miami. People flee the Keys, and storm panic spreads as Britt confronts her mother, demanding the long-kept secrets of the past.
Book 5
In dreams, Britt relives a shooting in which she was forced to kill a man. Just as Miami suffers the effects of the hurricane that ravaged the city at the time of her fatal encounter, she suffers the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome.'
Book 7
The perfect, nude corpse of a beautiful woman washes up on a pristine Miami Beach - her body tanned and shapely, her nails elegantly manicured. The problem is that the victim, Kaithlin Jordan, was murdered ten years ago. And her convicted killer - her husband, R.J. Jordan, scion of a wealthy and powerful South Florida family - sits on death row, just weeks away from his execution. Newspaper reporter Britt Montero recalls the high-profile murder trial that heated up a volatile tropical city like the merciless August sun. Even without a body, the prosecution case against Jordan seemed airtight and the jury enthusiastically bought into it. Now R.J. is preparing to walk. Impulsive and explosive, with a turbulent love life and a unique, highly charged relationship with this singular metropolis erected between swamp and sea, Britt is only truly happy when she's involved in a juice murder story. And this one has the right smell and feel...and threat.
Because somewhere in the tangle of an enigmatic beauty's bizarre life and even stranger rebirth - somewhere between the sparkling gold coast glamour and flashing neon sleaze - are secret passions and buried solutions that could doom an overly inquisitive journalist with a tendency to leap before she looks. After all, this is Miami, where anything is possible...even dying twice.
Because somewhere in the tangle of an enigmatic beauty's bizarre life and even stranger rebirth - somewhere between the sparkling gold coast glamour and flashing neon sleaze - are secret passions and buried solutions that could doom an overly inquisitive journalist with a tendency to leap before she looks. After all, this is Miami, where anything is possible...even dying twice.
Book 8
A chance encounter in a morgue changes Britt forever. Suddenly the dead body of the man on the table captures her curiosity, the man had a tale to tell. Britt quickly takes up the case and is lead back 14 years to a murder of two young lovers, whose killers were never found. Nothing is what it seems and the inferno is yet to come.
