‘Legally Dead’ by Edna Buchanan
Published by Simon & Schuster. August 2008. ISBN: 978-0743294775
In a scenario reminiscent of Thomas Perry’s wonderful Jane Whitefield series, Edna Buchanan gives us Michael Venturi, formerly a member of the US Marine Force Recon, more recently a US Marshal with the Witness Protection Program. In a series of events which continues to haunt him, Venturi created a new identity for a mobster turned Government witness and relocated the man to a rural town in New Hampshire, with tragic consequences after the man reverted to type. He thinks: “He’d arranged too many fresh starts for undeserving people. Considering his own role in the New Hampshire tragedy, he probably didn’t deserve a new life, either. But he . . . decided he’d do the best he could.”
After being fired by the Feds, Venturi embarks on a new mission: to create new identities for innocent people who really need to put their pasts behind them and start new lives. In order to do that, Venturi and his team must re-create all of the components of these people’s lives and relocate them, after first arranging for their former lives to convincingly “end,” with all that that implies, including their being declared “legally dead,” allowing them to emerge elsewhere in the world with new looks and new identities. “Who wouldn’t want a fresh start, a new life?” he says. Thirty-eight years old, and having lost his wife and their unborn child in the Staten Island ferry crash three years earlier, Michael is seeking some kind of redemption.
This is Ms. Buchanan’s 17th book, and follows her popular Britt Montero series. Many parts of the plot are somewhat implausible – e.g., one of Michael’s team works for the CIA although he never seems to be actually “working” in that capacity – but it is a fascinating premise, and the author delivers a solid novel with a couple of startling surprises in the last several pages.
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Gloria Feit