Edna Buchanan

A native of Paterson, New Jersey, Edna Buchanan announced at age four that she planned to write books when she grew up. She couldn't read yet, but Buchanan was already hooked on stories. Her first job was in a coat factory at age 12, and eventually she and her mother worked together building switchboards at Western Electric. For vacation, they went to Miami Beach, and for Buchanan it was love at first sight.

Her first job in Miami was at a small newspaper where she planned to support herself while writing. She didn't realize that the daily whirlwind of journalism can swallow up one's entire life and leave no time to read a novel, much less write one. At the Miami Beach Daily Sun she covered local politics, courts, and police, interviewed celebrities, took pictures, picked the greyhound races for the sports department, wrote a column, and wrote the letters to the editor when readers did not.

Five years and numerous awards later, she joined the Miami Herald. After a year on general assignment and a year on the criminal court beat, Buchanan suggested that a reporter should visit the police departments, the jail, and the morgue each day. Her editor thought she was volunteering, and to her shock, Buchanan found herself covering the cops. In her years on the police beat she reported more than 5,000 violent deaths, 3,000 of which were homicides. She won the Society of Professional Journalists Green Eye Shade Award for deadline reporting.

1986 was an eventful year for Buchanan: she was the subject of a profile by Calvin Trillin in The New Yorker, won the Pulitzer for her police coverage, and signed a book contract with Random House. The Corpse Had A Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America's Hottest Beat, followed.

Buchanan took a one-year leave of absence from the Herald in 1988 to write her first novel, Nobody Lives Forever. Published in 1990, the thriller was nominated for an Edgar Award and later became a television movie of the week. The leave stretched out with Never Let Them See You Cry, published by Random House.

Contents Under Pressure was named one of 1992's "best works of crime fiction" by The Los Angeles Times Book Review and one of the year's best mysteries by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Since then, she's written several books, including: Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder, Contents Under Pressure, Miami It's Murder, Suitable for Framing, Act of Betrayal, Margin of error, Pulse, Garden of Evil, You Only Die Twice, and The Ice Maiden. Her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies as well, and her writing can be seen in a number of publications, such as Esquire, Time Magazine, and The New York Times.

Her 15th and latest novel, Cold Case Squad, was released in June 2004, simultaneous with a new, updated version of The Corpse Had A Familiar Face.

Her books have been published in England, Japan, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Poland, and other countries, and in 2001, Buchanan won the George Polk career award for being one of "the most prized and meaningful in journalism.