Juggling a family and a career has never been easy for Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady. Now the impending birth of her second child only adds to her burden, especially when two brutal crimes fall under her jurisdiction.

A corpse is discovered in the Arizona desert with the fingers severed from both hands--the body of an ex-con who served twenty years for a murder he claimed not to remember. Soon after, one of Joanna's female officers is savagely assaulted and left for dead while on an unauthorized stakeout. Since the victim is one of their own, the department directs the bulk of...

Juggling a family and a career is never easy—and it's becoming a real challenge for Sheriff Joanna Brady. Coping with the impending delivery of her second child as well as a staff short-age, the last things Joanna needs are two serious crimes.

First, the body of an unidentified man is found in the desert, all of his fingers savagely severed. Following the scant clues, Joanna learns that the victim was an ex-con who had served twenty years in prison after confessing to the murder of his pregnant wife. During his last days he was seen following and photographing a young...

Fifty years ago, when she was five, Sister Mary Katherine witnessed something terrible . . .

A former Seattle policeman now working for the Washington State Attorney's Special Homicide Investigation Team, J.P. Beaumont has been hand-picked to lead the investigation into a half-century-old murder. An eyewitness to the crime, a middle-aged nun, has now recalled grisly, forgotten details while undergoing hypnotherapy.

It's a case as cold as the grave, and it's running headlong into another that's tearing at Beau's heart: the vicious slaying of his former partner's ex-wife. What's...

Arizona sheriff Joanna Brady confronts two complex cases in this dazzling novel of suspense from New York Times bestselling author J. A. Jance

Back at home, Sheriff Joanna Brady has a newborn, a teenage daughter, a writer husband, and a difficult mother to deal with. But in the field, it turns out that she has much more. A rainstorm sweeping across the desert has revealed gruesome evidence: two trash bags stuffed with human remains.

In a separate case, an elderly couple whose car has gone off the side of a mountain leaves behind a note stating that they intended to...

The murder of an ex-drug dealer ex-con--gunned down on his mother's doorstep--seems just another turf war fatality. Why then has Seattle homicide investigator J.P. Beaumont been instructed to keep this assignment hush-hush? Meanwhile, Beau's lover and fellow cop, Mel Soames, is involved in her own confidential investigation. Registered sex offenders from all over Washington State are dying at an alarming rate--and not all due to natural causes.

A metropolis the size of Seattle holds its fair share of brutal crime, corruption, and dirty little secrets. But when the separate trails...

A cop lies dying beneath the blistering Arizona sun--a local lawman who may well have become the next sheriff of Cochise County.?The police brass claim that Andy Brady was dirty, and that his shooting was a suicide attempt. Joanna Brady, his devoted wife and mother of their nine-year-old daughter, knows a cover-up when she hears one . . . and murder when she sees it. But her determined efforts to hunt down an assassin and clear her husband's name are placing Joanna and her surviving family in harm's way--because in the desert, the one thing more lethal than a rattler's bite . . . is the...

When drug dealers murdered her lawman husband, Joanna Brady vowed she would carry on his good work no matter what the cost. With grit, courage, and dogged determination, she challenged the status quo--and won. Now, as newly elected Sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, she must battle the prejudice and hostility of a mistrustful, male-dominated police force and solve a grisly double homicide that threatens to tear the sleepy desert community to pieces. For the two bodies baking in the harsh Southwestern sun are connected by sinister threads that reach back generations--and by devastating...

A woman is cruelly cut down in a remote corner of Arizona, killed on her nineteenth wedding anniversary by a drunk motorist.? A year later, the driver himself dies badly, and all suspicions point to the slain woman's still-grieving husband as his murderer. But the truth is rarely black and white in the long Southwestern shadows, and one law officer is not rushing to condemn the tragic widower so quickly: Joanna Brady, Sheriff of Cochise County. Brady's convictions, however, are leading her on a twisted trail through inhospitable country--and setting her on a path that will bring her...

A prisoner languishes in a Phoenix jail cell, accused of brutally slaying his estranged wife. No one believes the man is innocent, except the new female sheriff of Cochise County, in town for a crash course in police training. Joanna Brady is out of her jurisdiction--and possibly in over her head. For a human monster is on the prowl, hiding the grisly evidence of his horrific crimes in the vast emptiness of the Arizona desert. And an impromptu investigation, with no official sanction and no back up, is drawing a cold, ingenious serial killer much too close to Brady for comfort--and, worse...