BEAUMONT AND BRADY TOGETHER AGAIN

Six young women have been wrapped in tarps, doused with gasoline, and set on fire.

Their charred remains have been scattered around various dump sites, creating a grisly pattern of death across western Washington.

At the same time, thousands of miles away in the Arizona desert, Cochise County sheriff Joanna Brady is looking into a homicide in which the elderly caretaker of an ATV park was run over and left to die. All the man has left behind is his dog, who is the improbable witness to some kind of turf warfare—or possibly something more sinister.

Then a breakthrough in Beaumont's case leads him directly to the Southwest and into Brady's jurisdiction. When the two met on a joint investigation years earlier, sparks flew. Under different circumstances, both of them admit, even more could have happened.

But here, as the threads of their two seemingly separate cases wind together, Beaumont and Brady must put aside echoes of their shared past as they are once again drawn into an orbit of deception.

Cochise County, both in fiction and in real life, shares an 80 mile border with Mexico.  I don't think I'm wrong when I say that smuggling both people and drugs is the county's biggest cash crop.  Once the illicit drugs or immigrants land inside the US, the interstates become the distribution routes.  With Bisbee on the southern end of that traffic and with Seattle at the far northern reaches, it's only natural the my two characters, J. P. Beaumont and Joanna Brady, would cross paths occasionally.  Here's the second one of those.

JAJ