Suspense

Day of The Dead
By JA Jance
2005

After retiring, former Sheriff Brandon Walker is invited to join the Last Chance Club, a club dedicated to solving Ling dead cold cases. He accepts, and the first case on his desk is from a case he was involved with years ago, and may have botched when he was Sheriff. This is incentive for him, to help him fight the boredom of retirement and to right a wrong he may be responsible for.
Young girls are being taken from an orphanage from deep in Colonial Mexico with the promise of a loving adoptive family in southern Arizona.
What awaits them is pure terror.....evil to the nth degree...Gale Stryker and her husband are so long in their scheme of debachery that they do not realize how close to being revealed they have become. Their secrets are realized and brought to justice, with Walkers help.
Walker is the kind of guy you would want on your side, never letting go or giving up. His case work uncovers the brutality that has long been hidden. ...
This is the third book in The Walker Family series. Highly recommended. ( )

A young Mexican girl is raped then murdered to cover up the crime. Two really evil people find that they enjoyed doing these crimes. The wife is wealthy and the husband is an MD, so they start a foundation that enables them to import continual replacements from Mexico for their savagery.
Brandon Walker is asked by the mother of the first girl to solve the crime through TLC, The Last Chance, a group of retired law persons dedicated to solving old and cold crime cases. Jealous, when her young lover decides to move on, the female culprit kills in haste then frames the boyfriend. Her hasty coverup creates slips that ultimately causes their downfall.
A strong aspect of the book is how it portrays the world of the Tohono O"odkam ( )

good — a little quirky sex crime

Young girls are being spirited away from an orphanage deep in Colonial Mexico -- told they're traveling to a loving adoptive family in southern Arizona, their hopes are high. But the fate that waits for them is truly horrifying: when death comes, it will be a blessing....

Former Sheriff Brandon Walker is living the life of a reluctant retiree. Playing golf while his wife, Diana Ladd, continues to write her bestselling tales of true crime, he desperately misses the action and sense of usefulness from days gone by. When he’s invited to join the Last Chance Club to review and attempt to solve long-cold cases, he little imagines the first case to cross his path will be one he may have botched back when he was sheriff. And when the case from all those decades past becomes entangled with a current murder, it seems a serial killer with a very long and shocking track record may be back in business...

In Day of the Dead, former sheriff Brandon Walker is asked by an old Indian woman to investigate the murder of her daughter who was killed in 1970. Walker, who is a member of a private agency that investigates old cases, takes the case on. In his investigation he finds other similarly unsolved murders involving dismembered bodies left alongside of a road.

I was largely unimpressed by Jance’s writing in this novel. I thought it was mediocre at best. The plot also suffered from a lack of believability. There really wasn’t much to like in this novel. The villain in the novel is almost comically portrayed. I would stay away from this novel.

Carl Alves – author of Blood Street ( )