Suspense

J.A. Jance's Arizona set novels should be read in order. This may not be great literature but I like the way her characters develop and interact through the series. The main character is Joanna Brady, a 30 year old widow who was elected Sheriff of Cochise County AZ. The towns in Cochise County AZ are Douglas, Bisbee, St. David and Tombstone. Having been there enough I can picture all of the locations in this books as I remember them. I had first thought that Ms. Jance wrote great descriptions but I later realized that the description was from my own experience and memory. Besides Joanna Brady the usual characters appear including her overbearing mother, her best friend the local Methodist minister, her daughter who is 11, and the various deputy sheriffs, medical examiners and towns people. A new character appears in Outlaw Mountain, Junior, an older developmentally disabled man who has been abandoned by his caregivers. The mystery begins when an older woman is found dead in the desert covered with Cholla spines. Plenty of suspects are available since the victim left a sizable estate. Who dun it? Was it her son whose business was failing, his sister or her shady car dealer husband or someone else? ( )

a 3.75 star read for me which i'll round up to 4 stars...lots of humanity included in this book. Butch is unbelievable, I wan t a man like him around the house. ( )

If there was an easy straight-forward answer to the guilty party we wouldn’t have much of a story. But as with all of the books in this series, the path to the truth leads Sheriff Joanna Brady and her understaffed/overworked department in a number of directions and it’s interesting to see how the various threads get us there. This is made more difficult as the know-it-all newly elected Sheriff of Pima County doesn’t want to cooperate with Cochise County’s Sheriff’s department regarding the death of a woman found in the desert.

There are two major threads to this story. The first involves the murder of Alice and we’re along for her experience as she dies. Her son and daughter actually add an element of entertainment to the story as these two people believe they have the right to throw their weight and opinions around. It also provides an element of danger to Joanna.

The other thread is more compassionate and through it we actually learn how good-hearted and patient Butch and Jenny are when a mentally-challenged man in his fifties, Junior, is abandoned by his caregivers at an art fair and Joanna doesn’t know where to take him while looking for his guardians.

What I love about this series is not only the police procedures and how and why Joanna makes the decisions she does, but her home life is challenging as well. Her relationship with her young daughter is made difficult with her hours and sudden calls out to crime scenes, and she’s relying more heavily on Butch for help with that. She also needs to face her relationship with him.

The various characters and relationships are what really give this series life. Every one of them feels real and three-dimensional, no one is perfect, and we’re always learning more about them. ( )

Jance is also the author of the J. P. Beaumont series, one that I like a lot. This is the first I have read of her Sheriff Joanna Brady series of novels that take place in Cochise County, Arizona. Apparently, in a preceding book, Jance explains how Joanna became sheriff, stepping into the role following the death of her husband, who had been sheriff until he was killed.
An elderly woman, Alice Rogers, is discovered dead, covered with vicious cholla cactus spines. In her hands is clutched a vial of insulin, yet she was not diabetic. She was a wealthy woman, and the clues seem to point to a mysterious gardener and handyman who has disappeared, leaving behind no fingerprints in his house. Alice’s grown children, Cletus, the mayor of Tombstone, and Sally, both had motives. Alice had a large estate, and both were in need of money. The plot begins to get confusing, and the book takes on more the feel of a police procedural as eco-terrorists attack a local subdivision construction site, a Tuscon woman is discovered collecting rattlesnakes whose home range the subdivision is destroying, Joanna’s chief deputy for operations gets drunk and resigns in despair over her engagement to a local writer, a substantial heroin ring is uncovered, and fingerprints of the missing gardener match those of a dead policeman who had been working on a corruption case near Las Vegas. Someone has also dumped off a retarded teenager at the local Catholic church bazaar, and Joanna has to try to locate the parents or guardians. Not to mention that Joanna, a single parent, has to deal with her precocious eleven-year-old and her interfering and obnoxious mother.
She’s a tough character dealing with the bad guys and manages to get herself out of some difficult situations -- I do wish the author had dressed her in something more practical than a skirt and pantyhose. It seems some kind of uniform would have been more realistic given herhands-on involvement. Everyone in the small town of Brisbee seems to be rather untrustworthy, and I hope they have a big jail at the rate the dead bodies and crooks are piling up.
It’s a good story, but I think I prefer the Beaumont series. Joanna seems to lack some common sense that other characters have, and some of her fears regarding her relationship with the former in-laws are just silly. ( )