Exit wounds

Review by Booklist Review

No need to have read previous books to enjoy this Joanna Brady mystery. Jance slips in enough background to bring readers quickly up to speed. Before that, however, comes a whopper of a setup. Loner Carol Mossman is found brutally murdered, her 17 dogs dead beside her in her blistering hot trailer. Soon after, two more women turn up dead--all three shot with bullets more than a quarter-century old. That single clue eventually leads Sheriff Brady to a horrifying secret that nearly destroys an entire family. The dramatic opening will suck readers in, and the pacing is a satisfying balance between Joanna's struggles to be a good sheriff, wife, and mother and her dealing with her reelection and newly discovered pregnancy. Joanna's compassion and insecurity--and her sometimes cranky determination--make her a particularly realistic and appealing protagonist. As in Partner in Crime (2002), Jance builds her story around a real-life contemporary social concern, in this case the psychological disorder known as hoarding. Brady fans won't want to put this one down, which may itself be a form of hoarding. Stephanie Zvirin

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In a fine addition to a lively series, bestseller Jance's ninth after last year's Partners in Crime, Arizona sheriff Joanna Brady once again juggles police work and her complicated personal schedule with ?lan. It's the Fourth of July, and Brady is racing from event to event, unofficially campaigning for reelection, when she learns that a woman has been found dead in a mobile home, surrounded by 17 dead dogs. The dogs died of the blazing desert heat, but Carol Mossman was shot. Then Brady gets the news that two female bodies have been turned up in a nearby county in New Mexico. Ballistics reveal that the same gun was used in both crimes. Meanwhile, Brady and her husband are delighted to learn that she's pregnant. Morning sickness and eating aversions play a larger role in Brady's day than she would like, but she struggles on with the minutiae of a sheriff's life. Clues to the three murders are slow in coming, but eventually Brady learns that Carol's father Ed Mossman belonged to a cult called the Brethren for many years, and the two women who were murdered in New Mexico were in the midst of producing a report on the publicity-shy Brethren. Joanna begins to understand that the more she learns about the Mossman family and this group, the closer she'll be to solving the murders. Joanna Brady's life is never simple, always busy, and full of questions large and small about human nature. (One-day laydown July 22) FYI: There are more than 10 million copies of Jance's titles in print. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Fans anxiously awaiting Jance's tenth outing in her Joanna Brady series will not be disappointed. The Arizona sheriff and her husband, Butch, are expecting a child. Those who remember her mother from previous novels will not be surprised at her reaction to the pregnancy. No matter; Joanna is convinced that she can be pregnant and run for reelection at the same time. The election campaign ends up taking back seat, however, when a woman named Carol Mossman and her 17 dogs are found dead in their trailer. The heat did in the dogs, but the woman has been shot. What caused this woman to hoard these dogs? Can the deaths of two reporters nearby have anything to do with their hoping to expose a Mexican cult called the Brethren? Does the deaths of Mossman and her dogs have anything to do with the cult? Joanna expertly wades through family histories and little-known facts before exposing the killer. Jance expertly weaves plot and family saga to produce another first-rate page-turner. For all mystery collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/03.]-Nanci Milone Hill, Lucius Beebe Memorial Lib., Wakefield, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Adult/High School-Sheriff Joanna Brady investigates the murder of Carol Mossman, who lived alone in the desert and was shot with an antique gun. Her 17 dogs died, too, due to an intense buildup of heat in the trailer. The investigation leads to the deceased woman's siblings, grandmother, and father, and two murdered female reporters. As the facts come together, it becomes apparent that the victim's father raped his daughters, impregnating at least two. While working on the case, Brady deals with the local animal activist group and illegal immigrants, all while running for reelection. While none of the scenes depict details of the incestuous relationships, the lasting effect of abuse becomes a major point of the story. The human abuse in turn leads back to the topic of animal abuse, painting a sad picture of the horrors of both. But Jance manages to keep the atmosphere positive, with lots of action, energy, and realism along the way, and Brady's personal thoughts and beliefs give a perspective to the events. This 10th in the series offers topics for thought and a rousing plot.-Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Exit Wounds A Novel of Suspense Chapter One Late on Tuesday afternoon, Sheriff Joanna Brady sat at her desk, stared at the pages of her calendar, and knew that Butch Dixon, her husband, was absolutely right. She was overbooked. When he had mentioned it at breakfast that morning, she had done the only reasonable thing and denied it completely. Coffeepot in hand, Butch had stood looking at the week's worth of calendar he had finally convinced Joanna to copy and tape to the refrigerator door in a vain attempt at keeping track of her comings and goings. "Two parades on Friday?" he had demanded, studying the two pages of copied calendar entries she had just finished posting. "According to this, the parades are followed by appearances at two community picnics." Butch shook his head. "And you still think you'll be at the fairgrounds in time for Jenny's barrel-racing event, which will probably start right around four? You're nuts, Joey," he concluded after a pause. "Totally round the bend. Or else you've picked up a clone without telling me about it." "Don't worry," she told him. "I'll be fine." Butch had poured coffee and said nothing more. Now, though, late in the afternoon and after putting in a full day's work, Joanna studied her marathon schedule and worried that maybe Butch was right. How would she cover all those bases? The Fourth of July had always been one of Joanna's favorite holidays. She loved going to the parade, hosting or attending a backyard barbecue, and then ending the evening in town watching Bisbee's community fireworks display. But this wasn't a typical Fourth of July. This was an election year, and Joanna Brady was an active-duty sheriff trying to do her job in the midst of a stiffly contested reelection campaign. Rather than watching a single parade, she was scheduled to participate in two of them -- driving her Crown Victoria in Bisbee's parade starting at eleven and in Sierra Vista's, twenty-five miles away, starting at twelve-thirty. She was also slated to appear briefly at two community picnics that day -- in Benson and St. David. The day would end with her making a few introductory remarks prior to the annual fireworks display eighty miles from home in Willcox. Stuffed in among all her official duties, she needed to be at the Cochise County fairgrounds outside of Douglas at the stroke of four o'clock. After years of practicing around a set of barrels positioned around the corral at High Lonesome Ranch, Jennifer Ann Brady had declared that she and her sorrel quarter horse, Kiddo, were ready for their public barrel-racing debut. That Fourth of July would mark Jenny's first-ever competition on the junior rodeo circuit. Joanna's showing up for the barrel-race rodeo had nothing at all to do with politics and everything to do with motherhood. Be there or be square , Joanna told herself grimly. Looking away from her calendar, Joanna walked across to the dorm-sized refrigerator Butch had brought back from Costco in Tucson and installed in her office. She retrieved a bottle of water. Taking a thoughtful drink, she stared out the window at the parched hills surrounding the Cochise County Justice Center. The thermometer perched in the shade under the roof of a covered parking stall just outside her office door still hovered around 103 degrees. Summertime temperatures in and around Bisbee seldom exceeded the low nineties, so having the temperature still that hot so late in the afternoon was bound to be a record breaker. Inside Joanna's office, things weren't much better. The thermostats at all county-owned facilities were now set at a budget/energy-conscious 80 degrees -- too warm to think or concentrate. She had a fan in her office, too, but she hated to use it because it tended to blow loose papers all over her desk -- and there were always loose papers. The radio, playing softly behind her desk, switched from music to bottom-of-the-hour news where the weather was a big concern. All of Arizona found itself in the grip of a severe drought and what was, even for July, a fierce heat wave. The radio reporter announced that flights in and out of Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport had been grounded due to concerns that the heat-softened runways might be damaged by planes landing and taking off in the record-breaking 126-degree temperatures. The announcer's running gag about its being a dry heat didn't help Joanna's frame of mind. Bisbee, situated two hundred miles southeast of Phoenix, was a couple of thousand feet higher than Phoenix and more than twenty degrees cooler, but that didn't help, either. Deciding to ignore the weather, Joanna switched off the radio and returned to studying her calendar and its self-inflicted difficulties. Months earlier, one of her least favorite deputies, Kenneth W. Galloway, had officially announced his intention to run against her. Bankrolled by a wife with a booming real estate business in Sierra Vista, Ken, Jr., had resigned from Joanna's department within weeks of announcing his candidacy. Minus the burden of a regular job, Galloway had been on the stump ever since. He spent every day on the campaign trail, crisscrossing the county with door-belling efforts and public appearances. And that was where he had Joanna at a disadvantage. With a department to run, she couldn't afford to doorbell all day long. She had done her share of rubber-chicken banquets and pancake-breakfast speeches for local civic organizations, but she'd had to squeeze them in around her regular duties. Which was why she had said yes to appearing at all those various Fourth of July events. She'd be able to cross paths and shake hands with far more people at those holiday get-togethers than she would have been able to see under ordinary circumstances ... Exit Wounds A Novel of Suspense . Copyright © by J. Jance. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Exit Wounds by J. A. Jance All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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