NOBODY LIVES FOREVER <i> by Edna Buchanan (Random House: $17.95; 241 pp.) </i>

Edna Buchanan is as well equipped as anyone to write a novel of crazed killers, obsessed policemen and compliant victims. When she began as a reporter two decades ago at the Miami Beach Sun, she was assigned to the society beat while she launched her assault on the all-male preserve of crime reporting. The Danielle Steel look-alike soon persuaded police force and editors alike of her ability to take violence and gore with the best of them. Her gritty crime columns in the Miami Herald have become legendary and won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1986.

“Nobody Lives Forever,” Buchanan’s first novel (she has also written a crime memoir, “The Corpse Had a Familiar Face”), draws its strength from the writer’s intimate knowledge of the seamier sides of Miami, a city where “police officers must always assume that everybody has a gun, including the victims, the witnesses, passersby and, of course, the perpetrators.” The novel opens with a catalogue of an evening’s senseless violent death: “It was the night of the full moon over Miami. The shooting started early.” Among the incidents: “Carloads of men, shouting in Spanish and armed with MAC 10 machine pistols, fought a running battle along the Sunshine Turnpike. The survivors refused to speak to police.” (Buchanan’s paired, double-whammy sentences are a signature.)

The setup of the story is a familiar one: A mysterious homicide draws two detectives into an investigation of a serial killer who strikes apparently without pattern or motive; in the excruciating stalking game, the track of the killer seems to lead ever closer to the detectives themselves. Although the solution to the mystery is too tricky (as well as too crime-trendy) to be entirely satisfying, Buchanan’s colorful details, rhythm and language make the book a thrilling read.