Act of Betrayal

As Miami journalist Britt Montero probes the bombing murder of a TV commentator, she meets Alex Reyes, an ex-prisoner of Castro, and uncovers a series of mysteriously missing boys and the man responsible for her father's execution by a Cuban firing squad thirty years earlier.

With a pulsating narrative drive compensating for a lack of plot subtlety, Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter Buchanan bids fair to elevate Britt Montero (Suitable for Framing), her spunky Miami crime reporter, into the rarefied air breathed by female sleuths V. I. Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone. This time Britt, hamstrung as always by boyfriend trouble, is on the trail of missing teenage boys-all white, all blond, all blue-eyed and all quite probably murdered. Her investigation splutters along, interrupted by her past, and by her half-Cuban heritage, as two older men, both professing to be Cuban patriots, hint at the existence of a diary written by her late, freedom-fighting father. But Britt has to move fast as people keep dying and as a hurricane bears down on Miami. With about a third of the book left, most readers will realize that Buchanan will have to rely on lame coincidence to untangle the child-killer case. Less a wily deduction than a matter of simple mathematics, this trite resolution grates badly. But everything else is first-rate, especially the neon-tinged, art-deco background of weird Floridian mayhem. $150,000 ad/promo; satellite author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The latest Britt Montero mystery involves the Miami News crime reporter in two cases. The first concerns a missing 12-year-old boy. In researching a story about the boy's disappearance, Britt uncovers a disturbing pattern in which a number of physically similar young boys have vanished. The other case begins spectacularly when a local Hispanic television commentator is killed via car bomb. His recent stance on a free Cuba had obviously angered one of Miami's Cuban activist groups. But the headlines quickly become personal as Britt is forced to examine the life of the father she never knew. Tony Montero, a freedom fighter, was executed in Cuba by Castro. A diary he kept while incarcerated may still exist, and two anti-Castro groups want it. What Britt learns about her father forces her to reexamine her relationship with her mother, whose seeming superficiality looks quite different in a new context. Though Buchanan's mysteries always ring true--she herself has been a crime reporter in Miami for years--Britt Montero has tended to function more as a plot device than a real character. That changes here. In the course of confronting her past and understanding her heritage, Britt becomes a more fully realized, empathetic protagonist, and that in turn makes this entry easily the best installment in an already strong series. Wes Lukowsky