UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: J. A. Jance, Desert Heat (1993)

             Joanna Brady is Judy Jance’s Arizona detective, forced into that role in this first book of the series when her husband, a Cochise County sheriff’s deputy, is murdered and his death made to look like a suicide.  Worse, there is evidence that Andy Brady was also involved in drug smuggling.

            Jance was not new to mystery writing when she published Desert Heat in 1993; she already had ten books in a series about a Seattle detective named J. P. Beaumont.  But the setting of this book returns to the area where she grew up, in southeastern Arizona, in the copper-mining town of Bisbee and the surrounding Cochise County. 

    Part of the book is set in Tucson as well, and since I grew up in southern Arizona, I keep trying to read mysteries set there, just because it’s pleasant to come across familiar places when I’m allowing my imagination to inhabit the scene of a book.  Unfortunately, not every Southwestern author writes like Tony Hillerman, and I have put down quite a few of these local mysteries after ten or twenty pages of mediocre writing.  Jance is a good writer, though, and a good deal of the interest I found in this book is in the way she has constructed it.  The book has a structure I would call comic.  I don’t mean that it’s funny, but rather that it has a plot arrangement that shows up in Shakespearean as well as classical Greek and Roman comedy.  Before the reputation of the good guy even begins to be threatened by the bad things he seems to have done, we have already been shown that someone other than the villain knows the truth and can eventually reveal it.  This is reassuring for the audience or the reader.  So it may be a test for Joanna Brady to continue to believe in her husband with each new revelation that seems to incriminate him, but we readers never doubt him and know the truth will out.  In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, for instance, we know that the accusation against the beautiful young heroine will come to nothing because the police have already captured the drunken bunglers who helped to manufacture the evidence against her.

            In Desert Heat, Jance concentrates on two characters, Joanna Brady and the woman who has unwittingly become mixed up with Andy Brady’s killer.  In different ways, each finds more strength of character than she thought herself capable of.  And if you want to know how the series will continue, let me give you this hint: Joanna Brady’s father was sheriff of Cochise County, and her husband Andy was running for sheriff when he was killed.  As one of the characters says, “sometimes the best man for the job is a woman.”