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

J. P. Beaumont has a dead dentist on his hands. His suspects include a sexually abused dental assistant, a brutalized wife, and her ex-con lover.

A brutal, psychopathic murderer is released from prison - and stalks his prey with intent to kill.

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. But the truth is rarely black and white in the long Southwestern shadows, and one law officer is not rushing to condemn the tragic widower so quickly - Joanna Brady, sheriff of Cochise County.

The blonde on the beach was screaming. A dead man lay at her feet. But the murder is only the first ingredient J. P. Beaumont discovers in a deadly mixture of politics and passion.

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.

Jonas Piedmont Beaumont has had a hard life and learned at a young age how hard life can be. Two marriages, a treacherous battle with the bottle, assorted midlife and moral dilemmas, and a few decades as a homicide detective haven't convinced him otherwise. When Beau and his new partner Sue Danielson are assigned the murder of an elderly woman torched to death in her bed, Beau finds himself distracted by Sue's difficulties at home.

Life has shifted for J. P. Beaumont. After a tragic accident that devastated - and ultimately disbanded - his Special Homicide Investigation Team, he accepts that he has left homicide detection behind at this point, but he has a lot of unanticipated free time on his hands. He's keeping busy with renovations on the new house that he and his wife, Mel Soames, the newly appointed chief of police in Bellingham, Washington, have bought.

Mateo Vega, a one-time employee of Ali Reynold’s husband, B. Simpson, has spent the last 16 years of his life behind bars. According to the courts, he murdered his girlfriend. But Mateo knows that her real killer is still on the loose, and the first thing he’s going to do when he gets a taste of freedom is track him down. After being granted parole, a wary Mateo approaches Stu Ramey of High Noon Enterprises for a reference letter for a job application, but to his surprise, Stu gives him one better: He asks him to come on board and work for B. once again.

Former Seattle homicide cop J. P. Beaumont is learning to enjoy the new realities of retirement - doing morning crossword puzzles by a roaring fireplace; playing Frisbee with his new dog; having quiet lunches with his still-working wife. But then his past comes calling.

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.

Alice Rogers, an elderly widow, is dead, found murdered in the Arizona desert. It's easy enough to pin the killing on the teens caught driving her car across the Mexican border, but Sheriff Brady isn't about to let it go at that. Alice was something of a free spirit, with a penchant for Scotch, the glitter of Las Vegas, and a romance with a man twenty years her junior. Her hot-tempered daughter Susan suspects Mom's boyfriend—her former handyman who moved in instead of moving on.

J. P. Beaumont's trip to Arizona turns into a nightmare when he is framed for the murder of a sleazy, teen-aged drug dealer.

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. For a human monster is on the prowl, hiding the grisly evidence of his horrific crimes in the vast emptiness of the Arizona desert.

When Jennifer Brady returns to Northern Arizona University for her sophomore year, she quickly becomes a big sister to her new roommate, Beth Rankin, a brilliant yet sheltered 16-year-old freshman. For a homeschooled Beth, college is her first taste of both freedom and unfettered access to the internet, and Jenny is concerned that she is too naive and rebellious for her own good. Her worries are well-founded because one day Beth vanishes, prompting Jenny to alert campus authorities, local police, and her mom, Sheriff Joanna Brady - who calls in a favor.

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

As she passes the site of a horrifying accident, Ali is grateful that it's no longer her job to report the news, until she finds out that the news is her own: the victim is Ali's cheating husband. And soon she'll find herself the prime suspect at the center of a terrifying web of evil.

Years after her son’s fatal overdose, grieving mother Rachel Higgins learns that his addiction may have grown out of damage suffered at the hands of a pedophile priest while he was in high school. Looking for vengeance, she targets the Catholic Church’s most visible local figure, Archbishop Francis Gillespie. When the archbishop begins receiving anonymous threats, local police dismiss them, saying they’re not credible. So he turns to his friends Ali Reynolds and her husband, B. Simpson.

J. P. Beaumont must find the killers of an entire family before they get to his five-year-old eyewitness, who was hiding in a closet at the murder scene.

When too many bodies start showing up around a skeletal skyscraper structure, the iron workers' union comes under suspicion. And J. P. Beaumont must solve the case.

After taking down the man responsible for his best friend's death, Stuart Ramey thinks the case is finally closed. That is, until Stu finds himself left with a multimillion-dollar fortune in Bitcoin in a desperate bid by Frigg, a rogue AI program created by the killer, to keep itself from being fully deactivated. To sort out his situation and take Frigg down for good, Stu enlists the help of Ali Reynolds and the rest of his cyber-security colleagues at High Noon Enterprises. But they are not the only ones who know about Frigg's existence.