Showing results by author "J. A. Jance" in All Categories

Ali Reynolds begins the summer thinking her most difficult challenge will be surviving a six-week- long course as the lone 40-something female at the Arizona Police Academy—not to mention taking over the 6:00 AM shift at her family’s restaurant while her parents enjoy a long overdue Caribbean cruise.

A pretty, popular teenager never returned from her secret tryst in Skeleton Canyon. Perhaps it was a 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. Now dark secrets about a future hideously destroyed are pulling Sheriff Joanna Brady of Cochise County into a lethal nest of lies and greed.

J. P. Beaumont is finally taking some time off to have knee-replacement surgery. But instead of taking his mind off work, the operation plunges him into one of the most perplexing and mind-blowing mysteries he's ever faced. A series of dreams takes him back to his early days on the force with the Seattle PD. When tugging on those threads from long ago leads to present-day murders, Beau's suspicions are confirmed. Some bodies from the second watch just won't stay buried.

Since the disbanding of the Special Homicide Investigation Team, JP Beaumont's biggest concern is pondering whether he and his wife, Mel, should finally get a dog. But one voicemail from his old friend Ralph Ames is about to change that. Through Ralph, Beau has become involved in an organization called The Last Chance, which enlists a number of retired homicide investigators to tackle long unsolved cold cases. The one that has just landed on Beau's plate is a 30-year-old missing person case.

For the first time, critically acclaimed, New York Times best-selling suspense master J.A. Jance brings together her two most beloved creations: Arizona sheriff Joanna Brady and Seattle investigator J.P. Beaumont.

Set against the backdrop of the modern west, this gripping tale finds Sheriff Brady juggling a precarious overload in both her personal and professional lives. About to be married, Joanna's facing a daughter turning 12 and going on 20, a meddlesome mother micro-managing her wedding, and new in-laws arriving any day. But amidst the uproar, the report of a homicide at Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains quickly captures Joanna's full attention. An Indian woman has been found shot to death - a woman recently released from prision after serving time for the manslaughter killing of her husband. She is the mother of a missing 15-year-old, Lucy Ridder.

With his hand trapped in the door of a speeding car, a man struggles to remain upright as he's dragged along a deserted stretch of San Juan Road in Phoenix's South Mountain Preserve. It's the perfect place to drive a man to his grave: literally. 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.

In Deadly Stakes, police-academy-trained former reporter Ali Reynolds is contacted to investigate the grisly murder of a gold-digging divorcee on behalf of a woman accused of the crime. Lynn Martinson is dating the dead woman's ex-husband, and she and her boyfriend, Chip Ralston, have been charged. Ali is simultaneously drawn to the case of A. J. Sanders, a frightened teen with secrets of his own.

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. In her hospital bed she drifts in and out of consciousness, her only means of communicating a blink of the eye.

When Ali's parents lose their life savings to a Ponzi scheme, her father goes to confront his longtime friend and financial advisor only to stumble into the scene of a bloody double homicide. With her father suddenly a prime suspect, Ali and her husband work to clear her father's name while at the same time seeking justice for her parents as well as the scheme's other suddenly impoverished victims, one of who is a stone-cold killer.

J. P. Beaumont may be an old homicide hand now, but back when he was a rookie working with his first partner, Milton Gurkey—a.k.a. Pickles—things took a turn for the worse.

Years ago, when he was a homicide detective with the Seattle PD, J. P. Beaumont’s partner, Sue Danielson, was murdered. Volatile and angry, Danielson’s ex-husband came after her in her home and, with nowhere else to turn, Jared, Sue’s teenage son, frantically called Beau for help. As Beau rushed to the scene, he urged Jared to grab his younger brother and flee the house. In the end, Beaumont’s plea and Jared’s quick action saved the two boys from their father’s murderous rage.

Homicide Detective J. P. Beaumont had little to go on: a body, definitely male and decidedly dead, with strange little puncture wounds.

At first glance, the video appears to be showing a childish game: a teenage girl with dark wavy hair smiles for the camera, a blue scarf tied around her neck. All of a sudden things turn murderous, and the girl ends up dead. It’s as bad as a snuff film can get, and what’s worse, the clip has been discovered on a phone that belongs to the grandson of Washington State’s governor. However, the boy, who has a troubled background, swears that he’s never seen the victim before.

Sheriff Joanna Brady has a lot on her plate - she is up for reelection as sheriff and pregnant with her third child, and her eldest is packing up to leave for college. Then Joanna is woken in the middle of the night by a call reporting a motor vehicle accident. Her mother and stepfather's RV ran off the road at high speed and hit the pillar of an overpass. Something about the accident seems suspicious, though, and when Joanna gets a call from Ali Reynolds, a journalist turned investigator, she accepts her offer to help.

When Santa Cruz County deputy sheriff Jose Reyes, Ali’s classmate from the Arizona Police Academy, is gunned down and left to die, he is at first assumed to be an innocent victim of the drug wars escalating across the border. But the crime scene investigation shows there’s much more to it than that, and soon he and his pregnant wife, Teresa, both fall under suspicion of wrongdoing. Ali owes Reyes a debt of gratitude for the help he gave her years earlier when she was dealing with a troubled friend. When she’s summoned to his bedside at Physicians Medical Center in Tucson, she can't turn away.

Before he retired, J. P. Beaumont had looked forward to having his days all to himself. But too much free time doesn't suit a man used to brushing close to danger. When his longtime nemesis, retired Seattle crime reporter Maxwell Cole, dies in what's officially deemed to be an accidental fire, Beau is astonished to be dragged into the investigation at the request of none other than the deceased victim himself. In the process Beau learns that just because a long-ago case was solved doesn't mean it's over.

The bloody corpses in the broom closet of a Seattle School District building looked like a classic crime of passion, but 20-year-old clues point J. P. Beaumont to something much more sinister.

J. P. Beaumont investigates the death of a Japanese-American businessman, which appears to be a Samurai suicide.

Years ago Amos Warren, a prospector, was gunned down out in the desert, and Sheriff Brandon Walker made the arrest in the case. Now the retired Walker is called in when the alleged killer, John Lassiter, refuses to accept a plea deal that would release him from prison with time served. Lassiter wants Brandon and The Last Chance to find Amos' real killer and clear his name.