Customer Reviews

Day of the Dead: A Novel of Suspense

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

J A Jance has the gift to write in different voices. There's the Sheriff Brady Series, the JP Beaumont series and now the Brandon Walker series. Readers seem to prefer one or two, and I'm a strongo Joanna Brady fan. Day of the Dead isn't even the same genre, much less style.

The book opens with a young girl's horrific story. Wrenched from a quasi-detention home in Mexico, the young girl thinks she's moving to a new lfie with adopted parents, where she can go to school. She wakes up to find herself imprisoned by people she had every reason to trust, tortured by unwanted sex, with no escape but death.

As other reviewers note, this novel is really suspense rather than mystery. We learn the identity of the evil Stryker couple, and we watch them spreading evil till the very end. The crimes are so ghastly (like some of Lawrence Block's grisly details in the Matt Scudder series), and the innocence such a contrast, that I wonder if Jance was trying to send a strong message.

Perhaps we're supposed to see a vivid example of a wealthy, pillar-of-the-community couple who can literally get away with murder. We can contrast their protected status with the vulnerable orphans they destroy and even the wife's lover, who comes to a tragic end after being framed for a murder.

We get fascinating glimpses into native culture, reminiscent less of Hillerman than of James Doss. Walker's adopted daughter, determined to become a medicine woman, emerges as the most human and likeable character in the book. More distracting were the series of flashbacks that interrupted the forward flow of the suspense. The story of Brenda, a Native American lawyer who gets drawn back to the reservation, seemed especially irrelevant, although the character was likeable.

Jance is too skilled a storyteller to lose the reader and I admire any well-published author who goes out on a limb with a new technique. I can understand why an author might need to diversity her writing. Experienced authors must create new challenges for themselves or risk losing their edge. But as a reader, I can't help wishing she'd opted for another Joanna Brady instead.

I want to start by saying that I am a diehard Jance fan. I love the JP Beaumont and Joanna Brady novels but I found this one so disturbing that I gave it up after 100 pages and just flipped to the end.

Why? It was very gory, graphic and disturbing. I, personally, felt no reason to have included such graphic, detailed child rape and murder scenes. The bottle scene and others were just too much for me.

When I read, I want to be entertained with a good story, perhaps some humor... and I don't want nightmares. This one definitely could give a sensitive soul nightmares for days.

I'm not giving up on Jance but, I disagree with another review, I don't see this character being her most memorable. It's just not a comfortable read.

We're fans of Jance, having read her some two dozen mysteries in the JP Beaumont and Sheriff Joanna Brady series. Jance has over time given us three quite different thrillers, which the author defines as stories in which the reader knows the culprits all along, with the suspense coming from the race between the bad guys and the good guys hunting them. These three novels, Hour of the Hunter, Kiss of the Bees, and this new one, Day of the Dead, are actually forming a series themselves, featuring ex-Sheriff Brandon Walker and his family, and the Tohono O'Odham Indian nation. Part of the book is used to expose us to the legends and practices, ala Tony Hillerman, of these native Americans, who in many cases are the victims of nearby evil white men. These sections of the book are interesting, but some will find they slow down the action and detract from the plot. A more balanced view is that they add illumination and evocative background to an otherwise dark storyline about child molestation, sexual deviance, and torture.

Walker gets involved when he's invited to join The Last Chance, a volunteer investigative foundation (managed by our buddy Ralph Ames, JP Beaumont's lawyer friend!); he promptly gets embroiled in a 30-year-old cold case involving a dismembered teenaged young Indian woman. Meanwhile, a new dismembered corpse, a Hispanic teenager, has just been discovered out in the desert; and the authorities who care (as opposed to the ones in charge) begin to suspect a link between the two. Before it's over, many more results of the serial killers efforts will become apparent, and will the rich bad guys escape and fly to Mexico?

Jance warns that the Walker set is "R-rated" compared to her normal fare; the plot is indeed disturbingly evil. Despite the author's fine writing, the first third of the book gets a little slow until Walker starts to zero in on some suspects, and then the action really heats up. Frankly, we prefer Jance's mystery novels, where the violence and inhumanity are less out front. But we have to admit we were turning pages quickly by the end of "Dead"; no doubt so will her legions of fans!

This series is several shades darker than Jance's Joanna Brady and J.P. Beaumont books, so if you're a fan of those books, just be warned that this series is different. I chose this book because I was attracted to the Native American spiritual themes and because I liked those other series. For me it was a mistake--I was looking for some light vacation reading, but this story was so creepy that it cast a pall over my whole vacation. Maybe I should have known better, but it's hard to tell from the cover blurbs--all mysteries seem to try to make themselves sound scary!

Unlike some other reviewers, I thought the parts about Indian family life and spirituality were the best parts. The ending was disappointing--too much shoot-'em-up, too many bodies dropping too fast. It would have been more satisfying, and less trite, to me to see the evildoers--especially when they're as evil as this--exposed to the community and brought to justice.

This was the first book I have read by J.A. Jance so I did not know what to expect. But I was very happy to find a wonderful novel. I know I will now buy more of her books.

This is the story of Brandon Walker who is a retired Sheriff in Arizona. He gets a letter from another retired police officer telling him about a group of retired police officer who work on cold cases & ask him if he wants to join. He saids yes. Then he takes on a case that happened in 1970. It was the murder of a young indian girl that no one bothered with. What he finds is a serial killer who in 2002 is still killing.

I couldn't believe all the bad reviews. I had previously read two Jance novels, both featuring Sheriff Johanna and found them entertaining, if light, mysteries. The first page of 'Day' grabbed my attention and didn't let go! I was compelled to fly through the pages as fast as possible! My only problem was with the inclusion of the Native American mysticism, which I thought unnecessary. Dianna, seemed incredibly dense. Did she not notice her husband and daughter seemed, well, a bit preoccupied and distressed?!!! But Brandon and Brian were a great team. The dedution process described well in additon to the difficulties with the politics of the situation. The Strykers, the killers, are fascinatingly evil. The wham-bang ending was great. Everything goes wrong while the good guys are trying to catch the murderers - including an enormous wreck on the highway! Just like real life! Good work from a real storyteller. Worth your time and money.

J.A. Jance is primarily known for two series: one involving Seattle homicide detective J.P Beaumont and the other concerning Cochise County, Arizona Sheriff Joanna Brady. DAY OF THE DEAD returns Jance's readers to yet another of her creations --- ex-sheriff Brandon Walker --- in a tale that touches, albeit briefly, on Jance's own past.

Jance and her family were, unknown to them at the time, the intended targets of a serial killer in 1970. DAY OF THE DEAD itself begins with a grisly vignette from 1970, when two Arizona highway workers make a horrible discovery. The victim is a teenaged girl named Roseanne Orozco; her murder goes unsolved for over thirty years, until her mother, Emma, goes to Walker for help. Walker is now part of a private foundation known as The Last Chance (TLC), which investigates cold, unsolved murder cases at the behest of the survivors. Walker's dogged, painstaking investigation unearths a trail of similar murders, all of them sharing an unspeakable methodology and a lack of discernible clues.

DAY OF THE DEAD is not a mystery. The reader learns early on who the murderer is --- actually, it's murderers. Larry and Gayle Stryker are pillars of the community, running a charitable medical foundation that has provided them with a lavish lifestyle and an inexhaustible supply of young victims. Their arrangement --- he tortures the victims, she murders them, he cleans up the scene --- is chilling, all the more so because we only get a hint here and there of how they came to be. The meat of the story is if, and how, Walker will discover who and what the Strykers are. The story is played out against the backdrop of the Arizona desert and the Tohono O'odham reservation, with the occasionally uneasy melding of the Indian and European cultures.

Those who have not read HOUR OF THE HUNTER and KISS OF THE BEES, the first two Brandon Walker novels, may find parts of DAY OF THE DEAD rough sledding. While Jance makes an admirable attempt to fill in parts of the backstory, it occasionally interrupts the flow of the present narrative. Jance's talent is such, however, that one is compelled to keep reading even through the occasional rough spots. There are multiple reasons for this --- the Strykers, TLC, the cultural differences, and Walker's stoic determination to see his investigation through --- so that what results is a novel that is a compelling, if momentarily confusing, read.

Brandon Walker, in the short space of three novels, may well be on his way to becoming Jance's most memorable character. Fans of Jance's two other series who have not availed themselves of the Walker novels should do so, and DAY OF THE DEAD is a major reason why. Recommended.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

I discovered J. A. Jance 4 years ago and have read every book she's written. This one is definitely the worst. The first hundred pages are spent introducing a myriad of characters and their histories (from her previous books). Very confusing. Very fragmented. If I were a first time reader of Jance, I would have stopped reading this book - but I persevered and finished reading it. I would not recommend this book to anyone -but I would definitely recommend anything else that Jance has written. She fell on her face on this one.

I have read every book in this series, would advise to start at the beginning as the characters continue from one book to the next. Try hard as I may I am always off on trying to figure them out. Once you start reading J. A. Jance books you can't put them down. Love them.

I listened to the audio book which made it easy to skip forward and forego much of the story that was disturbing. There were too many characters' first names that began with the same letter - too many "B's", etc - which made the story confusing. The story line centers around a group of people known as Tohono O'odham, People of the Desert, who are known as aboriginal Americans, previously known as Papago. There are some tortuous events that take place in the book and I didn't really need to know the torrid details nor did I want to know them. The ending of the book is abrupt as though the author ran out of ideas. By the end of the book, I wanted the perpetrators of the crime to pay for what they had done, within reason. All in all Jance tells a good story, but I hope she doesn't continue to write this particular kind of book.