As always in "Dame Edna's" crime capers about Biscayne Bay, the municipal landscape is lively and oh-so deadly, with strippers, drug dealers, refugees smuggled in from Cuba and Haiti, beach bums and deadbeats, Castro's castoff criminals, high-rise condo dwellers, sleazy politicians, and doughty senior citizens who mix shuffleboard with romance in Miami Beach elderly enclaves known as "Heaven's Waiting Room."

Overworked and stressed to the max, the Cold Case Squad headed by hard-nosed but softhearted Lt. Kathleen Constance Riley sets out to resurrect from musty files and skeleton forensics two separate but equally bizarre cases.

First is the 12-year-old case of a philandering scam artist killed in an explosion and fire in his garage. His widow claims to keep seeing him in places far and near. Then there is a "meshuga" serial killer who preys on old women and lays them out in accordance with Orthodox Jewish ritual, including eggshells and a clean kitchen floor.

The complex plots gasp and simmer in Miami's sizzling heat. Riley is ably assisted and sometimes resisted by Sgt. Craig Burch, a workaholic cop with a wacky, jealous wife; and detectives Pete Nazario, a "Pedro Pan" who arrived from Cuba as a child refugee, and Sam Stone, a product of Overtown, Miami's black ghetto, who was raised by a savvy grandmother.

Buchanan knows crime, and she knows cops and the job pressures that can unhinge them or, as Burch puts it: "Once I got into homicide, I was never home."

As a reporter on the police beat, Buchanan won the Pulitzer Prize covering Miami when it had the nation's highest murder rate and had to rent a refrigerated trailer from a fast-food chain to ice the excess of corpses.

A member of the external advisory board of the International Forensic Institute, this dead-on-the-mark novelist makes no bones about what modern crime lab pathologists can deduce from yellowing old skulls, fragments of jawbone and faded dental records.

After eight deliciously deadly whodunits, Buchanan has furloughed Britt Montero, her crime-busting Cuban-American reporter, to launch the Cold Case Squad with a fiery explosion in the very opening chapters.

Keep those cadavers coming, Edna. There's always room to park another reefer trailer outside the Miami morgue.

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Cold Case Squad. By Edna Buchanan. Simon & Schuster. 261 Pages. $22.95.