Killer Stories From the Front   

Never Let Them See You Cry
By Edna Buchanan
Random House

Never Let Them See You Cry
By Edna Buchanan
Random House
327 pages; $20

If God is in the details, as the adage goes, then Edna Buchanan is a prophet. Her tales from the violent streets of Miami — gathered during 18 years as a Herald reporter — contain enough juicy pathos to keep fans of her crime journalism content for hours.

Not that you'll be comfortable reading vivid details of the crazy murders, thefts and accidents that Buchanan has covered. Her descriptions of poor saps buying the farm in unsavory, trivial and mostly pointless ways make it all too easy to imagine a drug-crazed killer outside your window with a frozen halibut or some other ridiculous weapon ready to make you a Buchanan lead.

Still, her book is as engrossing as its predecessor, "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face," mostly because she has a way with few words. Although my favorite Buchanan line is a classic cited in the New Yorker about an ex-con shot dead after he slugged a fast-food clerk who had run out of chicken ("Gary Robinson died hungry"), she offers a handful of new and memorable mantras in "Never." "The person most likely to murder you sits across the breakfast table" and "I have become a conscientious objector in the war between the sexes." Plus this explanation from a man to his mother on why he was late for the first time picking her up at church: "I had to stop and save a girl from the bay." His mother's reply: "I knew God had a reason."

The soul of Buchanan's book is its reporting. She's the type who notices that a defendant uses "red ink on a yellow legal pad" while doodling during his murder trial. Her favorite part of the day in Miami is "the midnight tour of duty" with homicide detectives. She insists she is "more comfortable knocking on a stranger's door to inquire if he murdered his wife than making small talk with the literati at a cocktail party." The back-of-the-book bio brags that she's covered "more than 5,000 violent deaths, 3,000 of them murders" — a figure few but Buchanan would compute.

As in her previous crime chronicle, Buchanan includes some pages in "Never" on animals. Like her boring chapter on her cats in "Corpse," the sequel includes a story about a duck. Mercifully, it's quick. When she otherwise writes about topics besides crime, it's a winner. Her portrayal of a family where the father and three sons all died of cancer wasn't the tearjerking "Drama in Real Life" that many such newspaper stories turn into. It was touching without the gnashing of teeth.

If there's a fault to the book besides the duck, it's that reporting only the excessively ironic or the horribly tragic makes every death seem made-for-television. For most of the 23,000 Americans gunned down, stabbed, strangled or beaten to death each year, leaving the world is much more mundane but just as painful.