JOANNA BRADY J.P. BEAUMONT
TOGETHER AT LAST

An up-and-coming African American artist has been murdered on Sheriff Joanna Brady’s turf in Cochise County, Arizona. Unfortunately the victim happens to be in the Washington State Attorney General’s Witness Protection Program. As the most recent hire in AG’s Special Homicide Investigation Team, J.P. Beaumont gets the call. He reluctantly heads off for Bisbee, Arizona where he tangles not only with Joanna Brady and a contract killer but with some of his own personal demons as well. When two top-drawer and independent minded investigators head-on, you can’t expect the result to be sweetness and light. After all, sometimes having two lead detectives on a single case is one detective too many.

People often want to know where stories come from. Here’s the deal with Partner in Crime.

When Desert Heat, the first Joanna Brady book came out, people began asking me if Arizona’s Sheriff Brady and Seattle’s J.P. Beaumont were ever going to meet. I knew that in order to write such a story, I would have to willingly suspend my disbelief for the six months to a year it would take for me to write such a book. Based on that, my initial reaction was to dismiss the whole idea.

In both fiction and real life, the Cochise County Justice Center is beautifully built. Unfortunately the architect of the real project was longer on aesthetics than he was on security. As a result, he created a jail that didn’t necessarily include a total commitment to keeping jail inmates inside.

Not long after the real facility opened, four jail prisoners let themselves out, went up the road a couple of miles, attacked an elderly couple, tied up the woman, murdered the man, and then stole all the couple’s worldly goods–including their pickup truck. Two days later two of the desperadoes, still driving the stolen pickup, were captured in New Mexico. A year or so later, the third was arrested in Florida. Then, four years later, the fourth was captured in. . . . Tacoma, Washington. The man had been living in the Pacific Northwest long enough to marry. Once he was back in prison in Arizona, his wife staged an ill-fated and, I believe, fatal prison escape attempt.

The next time someone–more specifically my editor–asked me if I could write a book where Beaumont meets Brady, I no longer had the excuse of thinking it could never happen in real life because obviously it could have. As a consequence my disbelief did indeed suspend, and here it is– Beaumont Meets Brady. Enjoy.

JAJ