THE HEAT IS NOT THE ONLY KILLER IN COCHISE COUNTY, ARIZONA

In the suffocating stillness of an airless trailer, a woman is lying dead, a bullet hole in her chest. Why someone would murder a harmless loner with a soft spot for strays is only one of the questions nagging at the local police; another is why the killer used an eighty-five-year-old bullet, fired from the same weapon that slaughtered two other women who were discovered bound, naked, and gruesomely posed on the remote edge of a rancher′s land.

The slayings are as oppressive as the blistering heat for Sheriff Joanna Brady, who must shoulder the added double burden of a brutal re-election campaign and major developments on the home front. With more on her plate suddenly than many big city law officers have to contend with, she must put marital distractions and an opponent′s dirty tricks in the background and deal with the terrifying reality that now threatens everyone in her jurisdiction: a serial killer in their midst.

Sheriff Brady must pursue this sadistic murderer into the shadows of the past to get to the roots of a monstrous obsession and expose the permanent wounds of a crime far worse than homicide.

When Exit Wounds was due to be published, I knew there would be readers who would refuse to read beyond the preface where the murder victim’s dogs perish of heat prostration in a run-down mobile home. By doing do, those same readers failed to learn about the very human tragedy that often lies behind the newspaper headlines about people who may keep up to dozens of animals in awful, unsanitary, and mostly unintentionally abusive conditions. Animal hoarders think they are “helping” their charges when, in fact, they are doing anything but.

For me, that was the point of the story. Due to their own abusive pasts, many animal hoarders are unable to help themselves any more than they are able to help the unfortunate and often sick and starving animals they have collected. In the course of this last year, I’ve heard from many, many readers who were outraged by the fictional deaths of Carol Mossman’s dogs. I’ve heard from only one reader who addressed the shameful family secret that caused Carol to be the way she was.

In the book there’s a far greater outcry over the dogs’ fates than there is over either the murder victim or over the dozen or so dead and injured illegal immigrants who are spilled out across the desert landscape from a speeding SUV by a people smuggler attempting to elude police pursuit. Not one of the people who wrote to me protesting about what happened to the dogs mentioned a word about what happened to Carol Mossman or the UDAs. I guess it’s a case of life imitating art.

JAJ