Never Let Them See You Cry - Hardcover

7 1.5-hour cassettes

Slightly blurred carbon copy of The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, Buchanan's riveting 1987 report on crimes she'd covered during her nearly 20 years as a Pulitzer-winning reporter for The Miami Herald. Novelistic tones still vibrating from Buchanan's less compelling 1990 police procedural, Nobody Lives Forever-- particularly those emanating from plucked heartstrings--are what distinguish this new crime roundup from Corpse. Again, Buchanan proclaims her love affair with Miami (``The hot-blooded heartbeat of this passionate and mercurial city touches my soul'') and only whispers of her checkered romantic life--but where in Corpse the hundreds of case histories took a hard edge, focusing on drugs, the perils of reporting, etc., here they emphasize sentiment, focusing often on heroes, mostly fallen, and love, usually gone terribly awry. The opening chapter, ``Putting It in the Newspaper,'' for instance, is a litany of cases in which Buchanan effected good by reporting stories--of a missing person, a homeless woman, etc. The second chapter, a clutch of heroic dog and other animal tales, also makes an emotional pitch--delivered, however, in solid declarative prose that firms the mush (``Few four-footed heroes receive accolades. Most are unsung, many without a home''). A flurry of cases--of criminal Christmases, historic crimes, homicidal love, cop heroes, rescuers, odd occurrences (such as that of the barbiturate-soaked gunman who took 26 direct hits from cops' guns and kept shooting until a 27th round took him down)--follows, sometimes so fast and furious that impact is lost. More moving are the longer ``stories'' that close the book, particularly that of the Southerland family--not a crime chronicle at all, but a testament to one family's courage in the face of cancer. Distinctly middle-drawer files--but still a generous bonanza for crime buffs, presented by one of the sharpest writers in the field. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.