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Southern Cross is the second of Patricia Cornwall's Andy Briggs and Judy Hammer mystery series. I had not known the series existed, but the set was being offered for free, so I took a chance on it. I can't say that I liked any of the characters much except for bullied, but talented teen Weed (it's his real name). Weed is being bullied by an older teen who calls himself 'Smoke'. Smoke is either a sociopath or a psychopath. He has a gang of five, forcing Weed to be his fifth. Smoke wants to put his Pikes gang on the map. Weed is terrified, but tries to alert the police through a computer map. Too bad someone else linked a lot of addresses together so that Weed's blue fish are tying up a police computer site.

Weed is ordered to paint the statue of Jefferson Davis in Richmond's cemetery. Because Weed is Black and he painted the statue to look like his late older brother, Twister, a college basketball star, you can probably imagine the horror and outrage that ensues.

One of the characters is Bubba, who has a belief about his employer, Philip Morris, that is crazy enough for the internet. Bubba is constantly being taken advantage of by his supposed friend, Smudge. Their cell phone conversation about going on a [ra]coon hunt is overheard by Judy Hammer and she immediately thinks of 'coon' as the racist slur for Black persons and assume they're intent on murder.

It took me almost two and a half-months to listen to all eight cassettes because I didn't care about most of the characters and events -- up until about cassette six, when it started getting interesting. The climax takes a potentially horrifying situation and turns it into a farce, so that wasn't bad.

Aside from the murder victim, of course, the book appears to be written as light humor. I wouldn't have given it as many as three stars if it hadn't improved so much during the second half.

Cat lovers should enjoy Nigel.
Dog lovers might like the coon hounds during their hunt. Boston terrier fans should enjoy Popeye. ( )

In this book, our heroes, Officer Andy Brazil, Deputy Chief Virginia West, and Chief Judy Hammer, have relocated to Richmond, Virginia, to improve the police department with a new computer program called COMSTAT—which fails miserably. The author uses every play on words imaginable—anagrams, aptronyms, inaptronyms, and malapropisms—mixed with racial slurs to tell a humorous story about cops and their antics. However, it's a story I can see some people lacking a sense of humor, including the residents of Richmond, might take offense to. ( )

I zoomed through this book. In Southern Cross, Cornwell takes us close to the sometimes zany (but always threatening) experiences of big-city police, in a story of corruption, scandal, and robberies that escalate to murder. The setting is Richmond, Virginia, where former Charlotte police chief Judy Hammer has been brought, by an NIJ grant, to clean up the police force. Reeling from the recent death of her husband, and resented by the Richmond police force, city manager, and mayor, Hammer is joined by her deputy chief Virginia West, and rookie Andy Brazil on the most difficult assignment of her career. In the face of overwhelming public scrutiny, the trio must find the link between the desecration of Confederate president Jefferson Davis's statue and the brutal murder of an elderly woman.

I will add that this book was much funnier than I expected. The fight between the police dispatcher, Patty Passman, and the traffic cop, Rhoad Budget, has to have been put in for pure comic relief. And there are other bits here and there that offset some of the horrific details.

As a Canadian, the pervasive use of guns is somewhat offputting. When Bubba goes to the gun dealer to by a gun to replace the ones stolen from his garage and talks about the rule that a person can only buy one handgun every 30 days, I was appalled. The only use for a handgun is to shoot another person and why you would need to buy one every month is beyond me. ( )

Police chief Judy Hammer is tasked to clean up the city of Richmond, Virginia in the span of a one year term. She is assisted by Officer Andy Brazil and Deputy Chief Virginia West. As a team, they will clean up Richmond and fix all of the police department's problems, with an ultimate goal of uniting all the police departments in the South, an okay beginning plot until you find they have one year to do this. Then you find that they intend to do it with a computer system. There is, in all this, a murder, and it is told with the usual Patricia Cornwell aplomb, but there is never any mystery and this is not a whodunit. I gave it two stars because despite the distracting names and animal characterization, there WAS a story, albeit a small one. I ended up really liking the character "Weed", but found the villain too villainous to be believable. I think Patricia Cornwell should stick to Kay Scarpetta.

I know I am going to butt heads with Patricia Cornwell die-hard fans but I will xeplain the 2 star rating. In the very beginning, we are introduced to several characters such as Popeye, our main character's dog, who is presented as though she can think like a human. Some of the story lines come from the dog's mouth; " "Popeye licked her owner's face and felt pity." " Popeye knew her owner was denying the grief and the guilt she felt about her late husband's death." How in the world could a dog, even stretching your imagination, know that ? Later, we meet Niles the cat, who has the same uncanny ability as Popeye the dog. There are other characters: Bubba (real name: But Fluck, wife's name is Honey), Smudge, Gig Dan, Smoke, Weed Gardener, Divinity, Wally Fling, Captain Cloud, Mr. Curry, Mr. Pretty, Mrs. Fan, ad nauseum. We are expected to accept these characters as real people. Each time I came across a new name, I took the book less and less seriously. We then meet the chairman of the Governor's Blue Ribbon Crime Commission (whose name is okay but suspiciously similar to Amelia Earhart), Lelia Ehrhart, who talks like this: " You're hanging out by a thread on a limb all alone on this one!". The only explanation we get is that Ms. Ehrhart was raised in Vienna and Yugoslavia and does not speak English well. I re-read several paragraphs, thinking my eyes had finally bought the farm, when I realized this was intentional. The plot? You won't be sure what it is until well past half of the book, ( )