A STIFF SHOT OF MURDER

The Arizona alcohol rehab ranch was no picnic for J. P. Beaumont. First they stuck him in a room with a sleazy, teenage drug dealer named Joey Rothman. Then they sicced the local law on him when the punk was discovered shot dead with Beaumont’s own .38. But the party responsible for Joey’s early check-out wasn’t satisfied with simply framing Beau for murder. Suddenly the Seattle detective faced a choice of fates far more unpleasant than cold turkey: a long stay in the State cooler . . . or an even longer one beneath the cold, cold ground.

When I began writing the Beaumont books, I hadn’t taken any creative writing courses, but I was smart enough to figure out that I needed to write what I knew. I had lived with an alcoholic for eighteen years, so in creating my detective’s character, I had him doing the same kind of drinking I was accustomed to.

I was doing a signing of the fourth book, Taking the Fifth. (Please don’t ask why I didn’t name the fifth book Taking the Fifth. It would have been much easier to remember.) A woman came up to the table. “You know,” she said in a hushed, confidential voice, “Beau drinks every day. He has a drink of choice, and it’s starting to interfere with his work. Does J. P. Beaumont have a problem?”

I shrugged her off because it was clear to me that my books were simply stories. But in the course of the thirty-odd signings I did for that book, six other people asked me pretty much the same question. Finally, the light came on. Alcoholism is a disease of denial. No wonder I was the last one to figure it out. That’s how, four books later, J. P. Beaumont ends up in a rehab ranch near Wickenburg, Arizona.

I don’t suppose it’s much of a coincidence to discover that after I'd filed for a divorce, my soon-to-be-former husband also ended up at a rehab place near Wickenburg. He was there for six weeks, and the counselors were after me day and night to come to Family Week. I resisted, argued, and railed, but eventually I went, and it was important that I did so. My husband was drinking again within days of the end of his six week stay, but my Family Week experience constituted the beginning of my own recovery.

The drinking part of the Beaumont back story provokes two entirely different reactions. There are people who much preferred Beau when he was drinking and carousing. There are others who tell me quietly that they’re glad he sobered up. I’ve also received four separate fan letters from people who have written to me from treatment saying they figured out that if their friend J.P. had a problem, so did they. To both sides of this issue I can only quote an old friend who told me once, “Honey, thank God we’re not all just alike. Otherwise we’d all be married to the same man and drive a Mustang.”

JAJ