MY FIRST WIFEʼS SECOND HUSBAND WAS ON THE PHONE, THAT MEANT TROUBLE

J.P. Beaumont’s teenage daughter Kelly has run off–and her tracks have led the sober-but-struggling sleuth to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. But in addition to one very headstrong offspring, there is something else waiting for Beau: a case of coldblooded murder.

The victim is an acquaintance–a sleazy rival private investigator brutally butchered, supposedly by the Festival’s current young Juliet . . though Beau has his doubts. But the Second Act is about to open with a second corpse and a touch of kiddie porn–leaving Beau center stage in a heart-stopping tragedy of revenge, deception, and death.

I was busily working away on the second Joanna Brady book one March morning when my editor called from New York to tell me that there had been a marketing meeting. The decision had been made that instead of the next Joanna Brady, they wanted the next Beaumont, but they needed. it by the same deadline, June 1. And so, in the middle of March I started on Failure to Appear. The book went from a dead stop to completion in six weeks during which time my husband claimed I never went to bed since I would still be writing at night when he went to bed and I’d be back up writing when he woke up. Failure to Appear remains to this day one of my favorite Beaumonts. (Yes, authors have favorites, too!)

For fifteen years now, we’ve gone to Ashland, Oregon, every year to enjoy the plays. While my husband was still working, we had to squeeze as many plays as our tails could endure into three grueling days. Now, with him retired, we see six plays in seven days which is a whole lot more civilized. When we went to Ashland the year I wrote Failure to Appear, I had just completed the manuscript. It was odd, because I felt as though I had been there for months. Somehow spending mental time in Ashland was almost as good for me as physically being there.

In the year before and after that book was written, one of our friends became gravely ill. Like Beau’s drinking years before, what was going on in my friend’s life leaked into what I was writing without my being consciously aware of it. Failure to Appear wasn’t dedicated to Larry and Linda Howard, but it should have been.

JAJ