J A Jance

Biography (from her website)

• Judith Ann (J. A.) Jance was born October 27, 1944, in Watertown, South Dakota, and raised in Bisbee, Arizona (the setting for her Joanna Brady novels). Before becoming an author, she worked as a school librarian on a Native American reservation (Tohono O'Odham), and as a teacher and insurance agent.

• Jance attended University of Arizona, graduating with a bachelor's degree in education in 1966, then a master's in library science in 1970. In 2000, the University of Arizona awarded her an honorary doctorate.

Biography (from her website)

• Jance has written three series mystery novels, one focused on retired Seattle Police Department Detective J. P. Beaumont, a second on Arizona County Sheriff Joanna Brady, and a third on former Los Angeles news anchor turned mystery solver Ali Reynolds.

• The Beaumont and Brady series intersect in the novel Partner in Crime, which is both the 16th Beaumont mystery and the 10th Brady mystery. They intersect again in Fire and Ice.

• She lives part of the year in Arizona and part of the year in Seattle.

• Jance uses her initials for her pen name because a publisher told her that disclosing her gender would be a liability for a book about a male detective.

• At signings, Jance asks bookstores to donate a percentage of their earnings from her appearances to various causes. Over the past 10 years, she has raised more than $250,000 for charity.

Biography (from her website)

• As a second-grader in Mrs. Spangler’s Greenway School class, I was introduced to Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series. I read the first one and was hooked and knew, from that moment on, that I wanted to be a writer.

• The third child in a large family, I was four years younger than my next older sister and four years older than the next younger sibling. Being both too young and too old left me alone in a crowd and helped turn me into an introspective reader and a top student. When I graduated from Bisbee High School in 1962, I received an academic scholarship that made me the first person in my family to attend a four-year college.

• I graduated in 1966 with a degree in English and Secondary Education and in 1970 received my M. Ed. in Library Science. I taught high school English at Tucson’s Pueblo High School for two years and was a K-12 librarian at Indian Oasis School District in Sells, Arizona for five years.

Biography (from her website)

• My ambitions to become a writer were frustrated in college and later, first because the professor who taught creative writing at the University of Arizona in those days thought girls "ought to be teachers or nurses" rather than writers. After he refused me admission to the program, I did the next best thing: I married a man who was allowed in the program that was closed to me.

• My first husband imitated Faulkner and Hemingway primarily by drinking too much and writing too little. Despite the fact that he was allowed in the creative writing program, he never had anything published either prior to or after his death from chronic alcoholism at age forty-two. That didn’t keep him from telling me, however, that there would be only one writer in our family, and he was it.

Biography (from her website)

• My husband made that statement in 1968 after I had received a favorable letter from an editor in New York who was interested in publishing a children’s story I had written. Because I was a newly wed wife who was interested in staying married, I put my writing ambitions on hold. Other than writing poetry in the dark of night when my husband was asleep, I did nothing more about writing fiction until eleven years later when I was a single, divorced mother with two children and no child support as well as a full time job selling life insurance. My first three books were written between four a.m. and seven a.m. At seven, I would wake my children and send them off to school. After that, I would get myself ready to go sell life insurance.

Biography (from her website)

• I started writing in the middle of March, 1982, a slightly fictionalized version of a series of murders that happened in Tucson in 1970; it was never published. For one thing, it was twelve hundred pages long. Since I was never allowed in the creative writing classes, no one had ever told me there were some things I needed to leave out. For another, the editors who turned it down said that the parts that were real were totally unbelievable, and the parts that were fiction were fine. My agent finally sat me down and told me that she thought I was a better writer of fiction than I was of non-fiction. Why, she suggested, didn’t I try my hand at a novel?

• The result of that conversation was the first Detective Beaumont book, Until Proven Guilty, 1985.

Biography (from her website)

• My work also includes the Joanna Brady books set in southeastern Arizona where I grew up, the Ali Reynolds books, set in Sedona, AZ, and five novellas.

• In addition there are five thrillers, starting with Hour of the Hunter and Kiss of the Bees, that reflect what I learned during the years when I was teaching on the Tohono O'Odham reservation west of Tucson, Arizona.

• The week before Until Proven Guilty was published, I did a poetry reading of After the Fire at a widowed retreat sponsored by a group called WICS (Widowed Information Consultation Services) of King County. By June of 1985, five years after my divorce in 1980 and two years after my former husband’s death, I went to the retreat feeling as though I hadn’t quite had my ticket punched and didn’t deserve to be there. After all, the other people there were all still married when their spouses died. I was divorced.

Biography (from her website)

• At the retreat I met a man whose wife had died of breast cancer two years to the day and within a matter of minutes of the time my husband died. We struck up a conversation based on that coincidence. Six months later, to the dismay of our five children, we told the kids they weren’t the Brady Bunch, but they'd do, and we got married. We now have four new in-laws as well as six grandchildren.

• When my second husband and I first married, he supported all of us–his kids and mine as well as the two of us. It was a long time before my income from writing was anything more than fun money. Eventually, however, the worm turned. My husband was able to retire at age 54 and took up golf and oil painting.

• One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that everything–even the bad stuff–is usable. The eighteen years I spent while married to an alcoholic have helped shape the experience and character of Detective J. P. Beaumont.

Biography (from her website)

• My experiences as a single parent have gone into the background for Joanna Brady–including her first tentative steps toward a new life after the devastation of losing her husband in Desert Heat. And then there’s the evil creative writing professor in Hour of the Hunter and Kiss of the Bees, but that’s another story.

• Another wonderful part of being a writer is hearing from fans. I learned on the reservation that the ancient, sacred charge of the storyteller is to beguile the time. I’m thrilled when I hear that someone has used my books to get through some particularly difficult illness either as a patient or as they sit on the sidelines while someone they love is terribly ill. It gratifies me to know that by immersing themselves in my stories, people are able to set their own lives aside and live and walk in someone else’s shoes. It tells me I’m doing a good job at the best job in the world.

Publications

• J. P. Beaumont series, retired Seattle detective, 27 novels, beginning with

  • Until Proven Guilty (1985), to most recent

  • Sins of the Fathers (2019)

• Joanna Brady Series, Arizona County Sheriff, 22 novels, beginning with

  • Desert Heat (1993), to most recent

  • Missing and Endangered (2021)

• Ali Reynolds series, LA news anchor turned detective, 18 novels, beginning with

  • Edge of Evil (2006), to most recent

  • Credible Threat (2020)

• Walker Family series, 5 novels

  • Hour of the Hunter (1991), nominated for Anthony Award

• Dance of the Bones (2015)

Cast of characters

• Joanna Brady, Sheriff of Cochise County, living in Bisbee, Arizona, with daughter Jenny and husband Butch Dixon.

  • She was introduced in Desert Heat, with husband Andy, who's running for Sheriff of Cochise County. But her good life explodes when a bullet destroys Andy Brady’s future and leaves him dying beneath the blistering Arizona sun. The police brass claim that Andy was dirty–up to his neck in drugs and smuggling–and that the shooting was a suicide attempt. Joanna knows a cover-up when she hears one . . . and murder when she sees it.

Cast of characters

• Butch Dixon, Joanna's second husband

  • currently unemployed while searching for a literary agent to represent him for the novel he's just completed; when found, she advises name change to something "gender neutral."

  • They're building a house and he wants to add a railroad track for his trains above the window ledges. Joanna nixes the idea, until the end of the novel.

  • He cooks, does laundry, and maintains the farm where they live.

Cast of characters

• J. P. (Jonas Piedmont) Beaumont, "Beau," retired detective from the Seattle PD, now a member of the Special Homicide Investigation Team (SHIT) working for Washington State Attorney General Ross Connors,

  • with O. H. Todd, witness protection case manager for Latisha

  • and Harry I. Ball

• Second wife was Anne Rowland Corley, from Bisbee

  • Introduced in Until Proven Guilty

Cast of characters

• Rochelle Baxter, "Shelley,"

• formerly Latisha Wall, from Macon, George, an ex-Marine MP, director of a juvenile facility for UPPI (prison), but blew the whistle on them for shoddy workmanship, inadequate budgets, and failure to provide a livable environment.

• Cornelia Lester is her sister

• LaMar Jenkins, "Bobo," former owner of the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge, Rochelle's boyfriend, very physically fit

Cast of characters

• Deidre Canfield, "Dee," owner of the Castle Rock Gallery where Rochelle was to showcase her portraits

• Dee's daughter is Serenity Granger, who shows up late in the novel.

• Warren Gibson, Dee's current boyfriend, but really

• Jack Brampton, who went to prison in Illinois (UPPI) for involuntary manslaughter (DUI). Previously he was a pharmaceutical salesman, which could explain his knowledge of sodium azide.

Cast of characters

• Frank Montoya, Joanna's Chief Deputy, great on internet research and phone logs

• Jaime Carbajal, detective

• Ernie Carpenter, detective, on vacation most of the novel

• Casey Ledford, finger print technician

• Dr. George Winfield, medical examiner, married to Joanna's mother, Eleanor Lathrop

• Marliss Shackleford, columnist, for the Bisbee Bee

• Naomi Pepper, Beau's current girlfriend, who is having problems with her mother moving in

Questions for discussion

• Most of you have read a good number of novels, including mysteries. What would you say is the dominant element in this novel—plot development, characterization, setting (here the Arizona desert), or some other element?

Questions for discussion

• This book includes a number of unusual plot devices:

• Sodium azide, a chemical element found in air bags, used to poison Shelley, Dee, and potentially Bobo

• Anne Rowland Corley, female serial killer, and Beau's second wife. She kills her father first because he has been sexually abusing her older, mentally disabled, sister. She moves on from there, including her first husband, a psychologist at the institution where she was placed, until Beau shoots her in self defense on their wedding day.

• Prison corruption, witness protection, a State Attorney General's wife, Francine, who listens in to his phone conversations and passes along the information to her lover in the law firm representing UPPI, Madern, Madern, and Peel.

Questions for discussion

• This book includes a number of unusual plot devices:

• Jack Brampton, a "hit man" hired by the lawyers representing UPPI, who had been a pharmaceutical sales rep and therefore knows poisons, and who dies, surrounded by Arizona and Mexican police, when the exhausted horse he stole, Princess, throws him and he bashes his head.

• What do you make of all this?

Questions for discussion

• J. A. Jance has written series mystery novels, featuring such detectives as Joanna Brady and J. P. Beaumont, in this novel, and Ali Reynolds in another series.

• That would indicate an interest in characterization, especially in series novels where the character is developed or "fleshed out" over the course of several books.

• So, what do you make of Joanna, and Beau? How do they compare with, say, Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot? Or any of the other detectives featured in series mystery novels?

Note: she published her first Beaumont novel in 1985, which puts her in close proximity to Sarah Paretsky and Sue Grafton.

Questions for discussion

• In those other mystery novels, the female detectives Kinsey Millhone and V. I. Warshawski, are single women without families and with no official police credentials.

• How does Joanna compare?

• And, those early mystery writers tended to focus on social issues as well as crime fighting. Is that true here?

Questions for discussion

• When Joanna calls in a Haz-Mat team to Bobo's house, their team captain, Ron Workman, assumes it is a false alarm. Joanna corrects his assumption, and Beau comments that:

• Most people are under the mistaken impression that sexism is limited to old farts like Harry and me. They think one of these days all of the old guys will die off, sort of like the dinosaurs did, and the problem will disappear from the face of the planet. I have bad news for those folks. Since Ron Workman wasn’t a day over thirty-five, they probably shouldn’t look for it to happen anytime soon.

• How much of an issue is sexism in this novel.

Questions for discussion

• Rochelle has been murdered, early on in the book, yet her portraits are given a detailed description, all are based on family members, and her sister Cornelia is a rather well-developed character throughout the novel.

• Why?

Breakout room question

• What do you make of this novel? Did you like the ending—the "almost" liaison between Joanna and Beau?