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

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.

For Ali Reynolds, the first Christmas without her father is riddled with grief and uncertainty. And with her husband and founding partner of High Noon Enterprises, B. Simpson, preoccupied by an upcoming New Year’s trip to London, she is ready for a break. But when Stu Ramey barges into her home with grave news about a serious—and suspicious—accident on the highway to Phoenix involving B.’s car, things reach a breaking point. At the hospital, a groggy, post-op B. insists that Ali take his place at a ransomware conference in London, as troubles brimming around High Noon come to light

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.

Not since Partner in Crime have New York Times bestselling author J. A. Jance's beloved series characters shared a stage. But now, in a pair of cases that cross state lines, Beaumont and Brady are back! Seattle investigator J. P. Beaumont is working a series of murders in which six young women have been wrapped in tarps, doused with gasoline, and set on fire. Their charred remains have been creating a grisly pattern of death across western Washington.

Roger McGeary, a brilliant software engineer, has gifted himself with an upscale cruise in honor of his 40th birthday. When he falls to his death from the balcony of his stateroom suite, the incident is quickly declared a suicide. Only his maiden aunt, a tough-as-nails woman who runs a racehorse refuge, refuses to take "case closed" for an answer and turns to Ali Reynolds at High Noon Enterprises to look into the situation.

The body lies amid the garbage behind a Seattle grocery store. He was a high-school basketball coach - and J. P. Beaumont discovers he was lynched.

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.

Who is J. P. Beaumont? A very human Seattle police detective who is hardened but hopeful, dispirited but diligent - the kind of cop who has experienced personal tragedy but still remains faithful to his duty. When J.P. Beaumont and his new partner, Sue Danielson, are assigned the murder of an elderly woman torched to death in her bed, Beaumont finds himself distracted by Sue's difficulties at home.

Lurking in the dark corners of J. P. Beaumont's bizarre case was not just a demented mind obsessed with murder, but secrets so deadly that even a street-tough cop could die guessing.

Ali Reynolds's longtime friend and Taser-carrying nun Sister Anselm, rushes to the bedside of a young pregnant woman hospitalized for severe injuries after she was hit by a car on a deserted Arizona highway. The girl had been running away from The Family, a polygamous cult with no patience for those who try to leave its ranks. Something about her strikes a chord in Sister Anselm, reminding her of a case she worked years before, when another young girl wasn't so lucky.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This time, Sheriff Joanna Brady may expect to see her maternity leave through to completion, but the world has other plans when a serial homicide case surfaces in her beloved Cochise County. Rather than staying home with her newborn and losing herself in the cold cases to be found in her father’s long-unread diaries, Joanna instead finds herself overseeing a complex investigation involving multiple jurisdictions.

Lance Tucker, an incarcerated juvenile offender and talented hacker in his own right, is set on fire one night and severely burned while hanging Christmas decorations in a lockup rec room. B. Simpson, Ali Reynolds's fiance and the man who helped put Lance in jail, feels obliged to get to the bottom of what happened. With Ali off in England to help Leland Brooks at a reunion with his long-estranged family, B. turns to someone else to help out - Ali's good friend and Taser-carrying nun, Sister Anselm.

On a beautiful sunny day in the Coronado National Monument, an elderly couple's car goes off the side of a mountain and into oblivion. The terrain is so rocky that a helicopter must be flown in to retrieve the bodies, and to make matters worse, a thunder-storm is looming on the horizon. Hours later and miles away, the subsiding rain reveals gruesome evidence.

After more than 20 years of distinguished service with the Seattle Police Department, Jonas Piedmont Beaumont is now working for the Washington State Attorney's Special Homicide Investigation Team or, as it's more commonly referred, the SHIT squad. But the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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.