Outlaw Mountain

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 when he finished his handy work. Now Susan's furious at her brother Clete, the do-nothing mayor of Tombstone, blaming him for not protecting their inheritance by breaking up their mother's winter romance.

Yet all is not as it appears to be, and Joanna is forced to put her personal life on hold to dig deeper into Alice's death, the lives of her greedy offspring, and the identity of her mysterious gentleman friend. And as the investigation gets sidetracked by ugly local land disputes, it takes some troublesome twists and turns, until Sheriff Brady finds herself wading through a murky morass of graft and corruption that may have given someone reason to kill — and kill again.

Author Biography: J.A. Jance is the American Mystery Award-winning author of the popular J.P. Beaumont mystery series as well as eight mysteries featuring Joanna Brady. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington.

J. A. Jance's tough-as-nails Cochise County sheriff is back in Outlaw Mountain , a heart-pounding suspense roller-coaster that's loaded with the twists and turns of a rocky Arizona road. Joanna Brady, a young widow and mother of an 11-year-old girl, is faced with not only a gruesome roadside death but also sleazy political machination and treachery.

Publishers Weekly

Joanna Brady — widow, single mother and sheriff of Cochise County, Ariz. — is the star of Jance's fine series of police procedurals. Joanna has grown and changed over the course of six novels (the most recent being Rattlesnake Crossing), and in this up-to-snuff seventh she's considering remarrying. She's also heading up an investigation into the murder of an elderly woman found riddled with cactus spines in the desert. The victim is Alice Rogers, mother of the erratic and blustering mayor of Tombstone, Cletus Rogers. At the same time, Joanna and her deputies must sort out a skirmish between construction workers and environmental protesters over the development of homes on pristine mountain land. Joanna is an appealing heroine, a talented, hard-working woman who must manage a department with its share of stubborn and strong-willed men — while she tries to meet the demands of her personal life. She inevitably works long, unpredictable hours and struggles to find enough time to do her job well and still see her with family and friends. Though Joanna's boyfriend, Butch Dixon, is sometimes too perfect, and in this outing, the motivations of some of the major characters tend to be murky, the strongly evoked settings and Joanna's natural charisma will carry fans along happily. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

You might call J. A. Jance a true town and country novelist, since she writes one series set in Seattle and one in small-town Arizona as she shuttles between the two in real life. In big-city homicide detective J. P. Beaumont and in small-town sheriff/mom Joanna Brady, Jance has created two mega-popular mystery franchises.