J. A Jance

Dora Matthews and Jennifer Brady, both thirteen, couldn't be less alike -- yet the luck of the draw has made them tentmates at a Girl Scout Memorial Day weekend camping trip at Apache Pass. Dora is a wild child, a pregnant, fatherless waif with a missing junkie mother. Jenny is the innocent daughter of Joanna Brady, the sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona. In the cool blackness of the high desert night, they slip away at Dora's prodding. What they...

"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...

A dying convict asks his cellmate to kidnap a girl and torture her to death because her mother blinded him while he was trying to rape her. On his release the cellmate abducts the girl, but she turns out to be as fiery as her mother.

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.

"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 whats 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...

The hardworking single mother of a young daughter, Joanna Brady still feels the acute pain of loneliness and loss, and the hole that was left in her heart when her policeman husband was brutally murdered. But Sheriff Brady is the law in Cochise County, and she will never allow her private trials to interfere with the job she was elected to perform -- especially now that murder has shattered the small town's fragile peace. A local gun dealer has died...

Beaumont is taking some time off to get knee replacement surgery, but instead of taking his mind off work the operation plunges him into one of the most perplexing mysteries he's ever faced. His past collides with his present, explore the staggering cost of war and the debts we owe those who served in the Vietnam War, and those in uniform today.

For more than thirty years, the case has remained stone cold- the brutal murder of a local Papago girl, her butchered body found stuffed into a large cooler that was left on the side of Highway 86. No one has ever paid for the horrific crime ... except, that is, the victim's loved ones, who suffer to this day.

In the night-still canyons of the Arizona desert, a girl is on the run. Alone but for her beloved red-tailed hawk, she flees from the dark shadows of her young life, the horror she has witnessed and the terror that now stalks her.

Joanna Brady dedicates herself to finding out the truth when her husband Andy, a Cochise County police officer, is shot in what is passed off by the police brass as a suicide attempt, and then implicated in a drug smuggling operation.