Описание к книге “The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America's Hottest Beat”:

In Miami, a few figures are regularly discussed by first name among people they have never actually met. One of them is Fidel. Another is Edna. —Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker.

Nobody covers love and lunacy, life and death on Miami’s mean streets better than legendary Miami Herald police reporter Edna Buchanan. Winner of a 1986 Pulitzer Prize, Edna has seen it all, including over five thousand corpses. Many of them had familiar faces.

There are policemen in Miami who say it wouldn't be a murder without her. She is a savvy, hard-as-nails reporter with a heart of gold and one of the first women in America to cover the police beat. Her editors call her a pussycat when it comes to stray dogs and lost kittens (she lives with her own four cats and a dog, Rocky Rowf), but when it comes to calamity, mayhem and violent crime, she is the tiger of the newsroom.

Edna Buchanan doesn’t write about cops—she writes about people: the father who murdered his comatose toddler in her hospital crib; fifteen-year-old Charles Cobb—a lethal killer; Gary Robinson, who “died hungry”; the Haitian who was knitted to death in a Hialeah factory; and the naked man who threw his girlfriend’s severed head at the young cop who threw it back.

She tells the stories of the misfits, the disenchanted, the evil, the wronged and, sometimes, the crazies, and her stories are a fascinating reflection of a dynamic and troubled city in transition.

There is Jack “Murph the Surf” Murphy, the beachboy who heisted the Star of India sapphire and found “Sweet Jesus” in prison and the young Satan-worshiping lesbian who confided to Buchanan in a jail cell the sexual stimulation she achieved by stabbing an elderly man to death.

“You probably won't see it on a bumper sticker,’ Buchanan writes, “but sex kills.”

She writes about drugs and the informer who professed his love for Buchanan during a wild ride in his car; about the baffling disappearance of seventeen-year-old Amy Billig and her mother’s frantic search for her daughter; and finally about her crime-breaking series that uncovered the police officers later accused of beating Arthur McDuffie to death and covering up the killing — a catalyst for the brutal 1980 Miami riots.

Counterpoint to the murder and mayhem, the kittens and corpses is Buchanan's own story: a tough New Jersey childhood; her two brief, wild marriages; her affection for animals and senior citizens; her longtime love affair with Miami— and her grueling, bizarre and endlessly fascinating work. Buchanan is honest, funny, highly charged and lovable—and so is her book.

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Описание к книге “Never Let Them See You Cry: More from Miami, America's Hottest Beat”:

The Washington Post calls her ‘“The Queen of Crime,” and no other police reporter in America can rival Edna Buchanan, whose reputation for being first at the scene and first with the story is legendary—and whose dispatches from the front lines won her a Pulitzer Prize and have set the standard for crime reporting.

Her riveting new book, “Never Let Them See You Cry”, picks up where her bestselling “The Corpse Had a Familiar Face” left off—with more of the breath- taking, bizarre and totally unforgettable stories that make up life in Miami, America’s hottest beat. Nobody knows the city’s facts and foibles, its history and hysteria, its heroes and villains, better than Edna.

“Never Let Them See You Cry” is full of the stories that have made Edna Buchanan famous: They are sometimes tragic, sometimes funny and always gut-wrenchingly vivid. There is the woman who answered a knock at her door and came face to face with her dead father; the bright three-year-old eyewitness to the killing of a millionaire—the second murder he’d seen in two weeks; Fred the dog, who became a celebrity after rescuing his family from certain death; the city’s deadliest senior citizens; and the homeless man who killed to save his beloved stray cats.

But “Never Let Them See You Cry” is much more than Miami’s mean streets and seamy side. It tells of courage, kindness and humor in the face of the most harrowing adversity. Edna chronicles the daring and the noble deeds of Miami’s real-life heroes.

“The best and the bravest among us are not necessarily cops and firefighters,” she writes. “They are often ordinary people who do the extraordinary when they must?” The quick-witted, stout-hearted children who faced off with a cop killer, one of America’s most wanted fugitives; the diminutive diabetic who lifted a truck off a trapped driver; the proud military widow, age eighty, who bravely battled robbers, poverty and starvation in a daily struggle for survival; and the courageous Southerland family, stalked for generations by the world’s most merciless killer—these are just some of the everyday heroes in Edna’s world. Told in her inimitable street-smart style (“The person most likely to murder you sits across the breakfast table”), Edna Buchanan’s ongoing saga of life and death in Miami is as gripping as a high-octane crime  novel—and it’s all true.

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About author:

EDNA BUCHANAN came to Miami on vacation from Paterson, New Jersey, and fell in love with the city’s bright textures and soulful sunlight. She settled in Miami Beach, working for a small, now defunct newspaper, and eventually became a Pulitzer Prize—winning police reporter for ‘The Miami Herald’.

She lives in Miami Beach with her four cats. She is at work on a novel.