Mystery Monday: Local Author J.A. Jance

--by Hanje Richards

J.A. Jance has written three mystery series set in Arizona. The Joanna Brady series is set here in Cochise County in general and in Bisbee specifically. Her two other Arizona series are the Ali Reynolds series, set mostly in Sedona, and the Walker Family Series, set in the Tucson area.
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Jance was born in South Dakota and raised in Bisbee. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona. Before she became an author, she worked as a school librarian on a Native American reservation, as a teacher, and selling insurance.

Joanna Brady Series

As the Joanna Brady series begins with Desert Heat, the protagonist is the mother of nine-year-old Jenny and the wife of Andy Brady, who runs for Sheriff of Cochise County but gets murdered before the election. Joanna runs in his stead, clears his name, and wins the election to become Sheriff, even though she does not have much background in upholding the law. On the one hand, many of the community are not used to having a woman in a position of power, which makes her job as Sheriff somewhat more difficult, but, on the other hand, her relative independence from the old-boys network of local law enforcement makes it easier for her to clean house there as needed.
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Desert Heat - A cop lies dying beneath the blistering Arizona sun – a local lawman who may well have become the next sheriff of Cochise County. Joanna Brady, his devoted wife and the mother of their nine-year-old daughter, knows a cover-up when she hears one.. and murder when she sees it. But her determined efforts to hunt down an assassin and clear her husband's name are placing Joanna and her surviving family in harm's way – because in the desert, the one thing more lethal than a rattler's bite... is the truth.
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Tombstone Courage - When drug dealers murdered her lawman husband, Joanna Brady vowed she would carry on his good work no matter what the cost. Now, as newly elected Sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, she must battle the prejudice and hostility of a mistrustful, male-dominated police force and solve a grisly double homicide that threatens to tear the sleepy desert community to pieces.

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Shoot/Don’t Shoot - A prisoner languishes in a Phoenix jail cell, accused of brutally slaying his estranged wife. No one believes the man is innocent, except the new female sheriff of Cochise County, in town for a crash course in police training. Joanna Brady is out of her jurisdiction – and possibly in over her head. An impromptu investigation, with no official sanction and no back up, is drawing a cold, ingenious serial killer much too close to Brady for comfort – and, worse still, closer to her little girl.
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Dead to Rights - A woman is cruelly cut down in a remote corner of Arizona, killed on her nineteenth wedding anniversary by a drunk motorist. A year later, the driver himself dies badly, and all suspicions point to the slain woman's still-grieving husband as his murderer.

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Skeleton Canyon - A pretty, popular teenager never returned from her secret tryst in Skeleton Canyon. Perhaps it was youthful rage or savage passion that ripped the life from a child of privilege and abandoned her broken body to the cold Arizona night. Or maybe she stumbled onto something terrible, something too dangerous to know.
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Rattlesnake Crossing - A gun dealer is the first to die, his entire stock of weapons cleaned out. But the killer isn’t finished yet, as a series of brutal, blood-chilling murders paralyzes the small Southwestern community the maniac has chosen to feed upon. Every stranger is suspect, every house the possible sanctuary of a monster who skillfully eludes each move of his pursuers.

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Outlaw Mountain - What kind of monster would savagely murder a 71-year-old and leave her battered corpse to rot in the Arizona desert? The slaying of a complex and truly uncommon senior is only one thread in a bloody tapestry – as death follows death in horrific succession, leading one dedicated officer of the law to risk everything as she seeks answers in the lethal shadow of Outlaw Mountain.
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Devil’s Claw - In the desert, a Native American woman is dead – an ex-con once jailed for the murder of her husband – and her teenage daughter has vanished into the long shadows of the night-still canyons. A terrifying excursion into a world of passion and violence, where long-buried secrets are the best reasons of all to kill... or to die.
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Paradise Lost - The desecrated body of a missing Phoenix heiress lies naked, lifeless, and abandoned in the desolate beauty and lonely terror of the high desert night. A hideous crime is inviting death once more into Sheriff Joanna Brady's world. But this time, the nightmares of her professional and personal lives are intertwining in ways too awful to contemplate, because one corpse is only the first piece in a twisted and sinister puzzle in which nothing seems to fit. And the next item on a killer's bloody agenda may well be Brady's own beloved daughter.
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Partner in Crime - The dead woman on a cold slab in the Arizona morgue was a talented artist recently arrived from the West Coast. The Washington State Attorney General's office thinks this investigation is too big for a small-town female law officer to handle, so they're sending Sheriff Joanna Brady some unwanted help – a seasoned detective named Beaumont. Sheriff Brady resents his intrusion, and Bisbee, Arizona, with its ghosts and memories, is the last place J.P. Beaumont wants to be.

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Exit Wounds - The heat is a killer in Cochise County, Arizona, with temperatures over 100 degrees. In the suffocating stillness of an airless trailer, a woman is lying dead, a bullet hole in her chest. Why someone would murder a harmless loner with a soft spot for strays is only one of the questions nagging at the local police; another is why the killer used an eighty-five-year-old bullet, fired from the same weapon that slaughtered two other women who were discovered bound, naked, and gruesomely posed on the remote edge of a rancher′s land.

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Dead Wrong - A corpse is discovered in the Arizona desert with the fingers severed from both hands – the body of an ex-con who served twenty years for a murder he claimed not to remember. Soon after, one of Joanna's female officers is savagely assaulted and left for dead while on an unauthorized stakeout. Enforcing the law has become more than what Joanna Brady does – it's who she is.

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Damage Control - A car carrying an elderly couple goes off the side of a mountain and tumbles into oblivion on a beautiful sunny day in the Coronado National Monument. A deadly fire and a fatal home invasion may or may not have some connection to the terrible crash. And miles away in the desert, a savage rain has revealed something grisly and terrifying: two trash bags filled with human remains.
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Ali Reynolds Series
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What do you do if you’re a forty-something female television newscaster and the powers that be suddenly force you off the air because they’ve decided you’re over the hill? And what if you discover, almost simultaneously, that your media mogul husband is a philandering rat?
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Ali’s return to Sedona, Arizona puts her in the middle of her parents’ travails as long-time owners and operators of a local diner. Her mother’s astute observations keep Edie Larson’s finger firmly on the pulse of everything going on in town while her father’s unfailing kindness to down-and-outers proves to be both a bane, an inspiration and, ultimately, a blessing.
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Edge of Evil - The end of her high-profile broadcasting career came too soon for TV journalist Alison Reynolds – bounced off the air by executives who wanted a "younger face." With a divorce from her cheating husband of ten years also pending, there is nothing keeping her in L.A. any longer. Ali is summoned back home to Sedona, Arizona, by the death of a childhood friend. Once there, she seeks solace in the comforting rhythms of her parents' diner, and launches an on-line blog as therapy for others who have been similarly cut loose. But when threatening posts begin appearing, Ali finds out that running a blog is far more up-close and personal than sitting behind a news desk. And far more dangerous. Suddenly something dark and deadly is swirling around her life... and a killer may be hunting her next.

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Web of Evil - Fired from her dream job as an L.A. news anchor and still recovering from the truth about her cheating husband, Ali is content to lick her wounds far away in Sedona. Her ex, Paul, is in a hurry for a divorce so he can marry his very young, very pregnant fiancé. But the day before the final proceedings, Paul's bound and broken body is found in the Palm Springs desert. Ali finds herself the sole heir to his wealthy estate – and the prime suspect in his brutal murder. As the evidence piles up against her, she must navigate a torturous path strewn with danger to expose the real cold-blooded thriller.

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Hand of Evil - Starting with a crime so gruesome even prowling coyotes keep their distance from the remains, a killer begins crisscrossing the Southwest on a spree of grisly murders. A hundred miles away, Ali Reynolds is grieving. The news job she once delighted in is gone, and so is the philandering husband. When a member of the family who gave Ali a generous scholarship for her education decades earlier suddenly asks her for a meeting, Ali wonders what it can mean. Before she can satisfy her curiosity, though, Ali receives another startling call: a friend's teenage daughter has disappeared.
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Cruel Intent - Ali Reynolds just wants a break from excitement to remodel her new home. But when the savagely murdered body of stay-at-home mom Morgan Forester is found, Ali’s contractor Bryan is the prime suspect. Bryan swears he has nothing to do with his wife’s murder – but as the investigation progresses, Ali seems to be the only person who believes him.

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Trial By Fire - In the heat of the Arizona desert, a raging fire pushes temperatures to a deadly degree, and one woman is left to burn. Pulled naked and barely breathing from the fire, the victim has no idea who she is, let alone who would do this to her – or why. Ali Reynolds is on the scene as the new media relations consultant for the Yavapai County Police Department, keeping reporters at bay and circumventing questions about arson and a link to a domestic terrorist group called Earth Liberation Front. Ali fearlessly pursues justice – and what she discovers is a secret even darker and more twisted than she ever could have imagined.

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Walker Family Series
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This series features ex-sheriff Brandon Walker and his family. This is the darkest of the J.A. Jance series set in Arizona. Jance combines Native American and Anglo cultures in these books set in Central Arizona.

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Hour of the Hunter - The hunter is free to kill again – and hour by hour, he draws nearer... The brilliant psychopath Andrew Carlisle spent only six years in prison for the brutal torture-murder of a young girl of the Tohono O'odham tribe. The testimony of Diana Ladd – a teacher on the reservation – put Carlisle behind bars, and now she can't ignore the dark, mystical signs that say a predator has returned to prowl the Arizona desert. Because no matter where Diana and her young son hide... he will find them.

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Kiss of the Bees - Twenty years ago, a darkness rose up out of the blistering heat of the Arizona desert and descended upon the Walker family of Tucson. A personified evil, a serial killer named Andrew Carlisle, brought blood and terror into their world, nearly murdering Diana Ladd Walker and her young son, Davy. Now, much has changed. The family has grown larger. There's Lani, the beloved adopted daughter – a beautiful Native American teenager "kissed by the bees" and destined, according to Tohono O'odham lore, to become a woman of great spiritual power. And now that the psychopath Carlisle has died in prison, Brandon and Diana Walker believe that their long nightmare is finally over...
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Day of the Dead - Retired Pima County Sheriff Brandon Walker's work with The Last Chance – an exclusive, nationwide fraternity of former lawmen investigating unsolved homicides – has brought new purpose to his life. But a gruesome, three-decades-old cold case is leading him into a strange world at the unlikely border between forensic science and tribal mysticism – a place where evil hides behind a perfect façade. A long-forgotten murder in the Arizona desert now threatens to bring home a new horror for Walker and his family, who have already survived the dark hunger of two human monsters. And suddenly, the relentless ex-cop is the only person who can still unravel a blood knot of terror and obsession before the innocent die again.

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Queen of the Night - Every summer, in an event that is commemorated throughout the Tohono O'odham Nation, the Queen of the Night flower blooms in the Arizona desert. But, one couple's intended celebration is shattered by gunfire, the sole witness to the bloodshed a little girl who has lost the only family she's ever known. To her rescue come Dr. Lani Walker, who sees the trauma of her own childhood reflected in her young patient, and Dan Pardee, an Iraq war veteran and member of an unorthodox border patrol unit called the Shadow Wolves. Joined by Pima County homicide investigator Brian Fellows, they must keep the child safe while tracking down a ruthless killer.
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In a second case, retired homicide detective Brandon Walker is investigating the long unsolved murder of an Arizona State University coed. Now, after nearly half a century of silence, the one person who can shed light on that terrible incident is willing to talk. Meanwhile, Walker's wife, Diana Ladd, is reliving memories of a man whose death continues to haunt her.

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As these crimes threaten to tear apart three separate families, the stories and traditions of the Tohono O'odham people remain just beneath the surface of the desert, providing illumination to events of both self-sacrifice and unspeakable evil.