Joanna Brady #19, William Morrow, 2021
Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady’s professional and personal lives collide when her college-age daughter is involved in a missing persons case.
When Jennifer Brady returns to Northern Arizona University for her sophomore year, she quickly becomes a big sister to her new roommate, Beth Rankin, a brilliant yet sheltered sixteen-year-old freshman. For a homeschooled Beth, college is her first taste of both freedom and unfettered access to the internet, and Jenny is concerned that she’s too naïve and rebellious for her own good.
Her worries are well-founded because one day Beth vanishes, prompting Jenny to alert campus authorities, local police, and her mom, Sheriff Joanna Brady—who calls in a favor. Beth is found, but Jenny’s concern has unwittingly put her in the crosshairs of a criminal bent on revenge.
With Christmas vacation approaching, and Beth at war with her parents, Jenny invites Beth to the shelter of the Brady home. While Joanna is sympathetic, she’s caught up in a sensitive case—an officer-involved shooting that has placed the lives of two young children in jeopardy—leaving her stretched thin to help a fragile young woman recently gone missing and endangered.
The delivery of a no-contact order goes arrive goes awry, resulting in an officer-involved shooting that leaves one man dead and one of Joanna’s deputy’s hospitalized with life threatening injuries. As Joanna deals with both official and unofficial fallout from the shooting, her daughter Jenny, away at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff also has her hands full. Her new roommate, freshman Beth Rankin, may be book smart but she’s also incredibly naive. Let loose with her own Internet access, she has hooked up with an on-line boyfriend who is anything but the handsome young man he claims to be. Soon Beth goes missing and Jenny joins forces with her mother to find Beth and track down an on-line menace.
In this book, the character who stole my heart is a seven year-old girl named Kendall who takes over mothering her younger brother in the face of their mother’s willful disregard for her children’s welfare.
JAJ