Customer Reviews

Fire and Ice CD

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

For J. P. Beaumont of the Washington State Attorney General's Special Homicide Investigation Team, the latest body might be the break in the case they have needed. Up until now the charred remains of several young Hispanic women have been missing their teeth making identification impossible. The latest body found in the melting snow near Ellensburg matches the other cases except for the fact that this body has her teeth. The fact that she still has them gives J. P. Beaumont and the team a way of identifying her and working the case.

Sheriff Joanna Brady of Cochise County, Arizona has a puzzling case of her own at a local all terrain vehicle campground. The caretaker is dead in what at first appears to have been an accident, but was actually murder. With his dog as the only witness and nearly worthless surveillance equipment, the case isn't going to go any where fast. That is until J. P. Beaumont comes back to Cochise County pursing leads in his case, the DEA gets involved, and human nature in the form of vengeance rears its ugly head, among other things.

Shifting in viewpoint between J. P. Beaumont, Joanna Brady, and others, the novel works its way to a satisfying conclusion. While that works, what doesn't work so well for the reader is the fact that frequently the povs of Sheriff Brady and Investigator Beaumont are placed together in the same chapter with little used to mark the differences between them. Gone are the days found in the early Beaumont books of his very own distinctive style. As the read makes clear, these days the main style or voice is with the Brady character with Beaumont coming across more and more like Brady.

Despite the quibble, overall the read is a good one. J. A. Jance seems to be following the herd of highly successful authors who have forced two of their signature characters together in the same novel. Ostensibly, it is a marketing ploy that is used to introduce readers to characters they nay not have read before. The results are often mixed from a reader perspective but in this case it seems to have worked fairly well.


Kevin R. Tipple (copyright) 2009

I've read a number of Jance's J.P. Beaumant and Joanna Brady novels. The author writes a very readable, compelling story that never feels strained or contrived. This book shares those qualities and I read, eagerly awaiting a final resolution of the main and secondary stories. The elder abuse investigation at Caring Friends was, unfortunately, left hanging. Was the owner put on trial? Prosecuted? Was the home shut down? Did the doctor who listed patients cause of death as "sepsis" despite ample evidence of abuse confronted? We never learn. To add insult, the reader who has invested hours and 300 plus pages finds the main story's conclusion hanging as well. Did the feds manage to take down the Mexican Cervantes Cartel? Did J.P. Beaumont and Jamie Carbajal's visit to Miguel Rios' home and their lame excuse for being there blow the feds case? The story ends short of an answer.

Her books are very readable, as is this one, but I felt cheated by the ending .. or its lack. The final chapter seems to be missing.

FIRE AND ICE by J.A. Jance lacks the fire and tension of her previous novel that brings together her two main protagonists, J.P. "Beau" Beaumont and Joanna Brady. They two actually meet late in the novel and then for only a few moments at a funeral. All the little bits of guilt for an almost relationship are tired and worn out.
This is true of J.P., he just doesn't make the grade in tension and obsessive dedication to his work, that drew readers to endure his long bout with alcoholism. Joanna lacks for fire of her hair and isn't even allowed to finish a poker game at which she excels. The new medical examiner in Cochise County is a very bad joke that the reading public doesn't deserve. Dump him somewhere in the back county and forget him.
Maybe next time the sparks and tension will be back on track for this excellent author; her fans are still loyal.
Nash Black, author of Indie finalists WRITING AS A SMALL BUSINESS and HAINTS.

This is my first J.A. Jance novel. It started out with a bang. Six bodies dumped in different places. Shorn of teeth, each was wrapped in a tarp and set afire with gasoline. It looked like a good mystery with lots of suspense. I was ready for a good read. Unfortunately, it flatlined from there. Too many characters and too much unimportant detail. I got confused when the two key characters, Sheriff Joanna Brady and Investigator J.P. Beaumont were covered in the same chapter with no signal to the reader that the author was changing characters. Perhaps the biggest disappointment was the less than thrilling ending. I expected some grand conspiracy but it just sort of ended.

J.P. Beaumont, and Jance's other bestselling series character, Joanna Brady, last appeared together in Partner in Crime. Solo, Arizona Sheriff Brady last appeared in Damage Control, and Beaumont in Justice Denied. Beau, a detective with Seattle's Special Homicide Investigation Team, first teamed up with Brady in Until Proven Guilty. Poor Beaumont. Even J. Edgar Hoover had the foresight not to call his agency Federal Investigation Bureau, before law enforcement agencies commonly used acronyms, such as SWAT. The attempt at being clever may have succeeded, if the acronym's commander was not Harry Ball. Make that Harry I. Ball.

More twists and turns than newfangled high-efficiency fluorescent light bulbs keep readers guessing. Two jurisdictions come into play with Beau's case, King County/Seattle's with the awkward acronym, and awkward to pronounce Kittitas County's Detective Lucinda Caldwell. Promoted as Beaumont & Brady "joining forces," this is really two novellas, with occasional phone calls between Beau & Brady. The only connection is when the body is tentatively identified as Marina Aguirre, believed to be from Arizona and becomes Beau's homicide statistic. B&B don't actually get together on a case, which may have ignited that spark with their last meeting into fire.

All bodies in previous cases are linked to the serial killer's MO--teeth yanked out to prevent identification and no jewelry, though fingers are not cut off, to eliminate fingerprints. When Ken Leggett makes yellow snow on top of what he thinks is a rock, he discovers a human skull. He reports the body and becomes a suspect. Beau quickly dismisses this, as killers rarely call cops, to lead them to a body placed there months ago. Without explanation, the latest homicide is linked to the serial killings, perhaps because the body had been severely burned--the only link to the MO.

During the autopsy, the M.E. determines the date of death as November 8th, by a watch stopped on that date. Beau observes: "My first impression was that this was a reasonably expensive watch that might very well be traceable." The expensive watch morphs ten pages later. "The shattered watch was a Timex--relatively cheap but reliable. It wasn't still ticking as the ads say..." An M.E. who ascertains a date of death in an autopsy report based on the date of "a relatively cheap Timex" certainly isn't Discovery Health channel's Dr. G. An emerald-cut diamond engagement ring and toe ring inside expensive snake-skin boots only loosely help Beau assemble evidence to identify the body.

Jance bounces readers between states, not mentioning characters by name for a few paragraphs. It's cold and raining in Seattle but tourists are wearing shorts. Nope, we're in Arizona. Back to Seattle four paragraphs later. Eventually, the Arizona-Seattle connection is made. The dead body with teeth and cowboy boots not fitting the serial killer's MO is somehow linked to the serial killings. She is believed to be Marina Aguirre (a/k/a Marcella Andrade, sister of Brady's deputy), who is on the lam from Arizona. Fortunately, Jance does welcome new readers by bringing them up to speed, recapping tidbits of information about Beau & Brady. However, two protagonists in the same novel speaking in first person can confuse.

Though Marina/Marcella wore expensive clothing, boots and jewelry, she worked at Denny's and could only afford the items at Goodwill. She lives in a trailer park that is a defacto halfway house owned by a benevolent former hooker with HIV, who just happened to win Powerball and lives in a mega-mansion. Marina/Marcella stole $50,000 from a drug cartel but leaves her son in Arizona. She comes to Seattle to start a new life. The killer comes from Arizona to get his money and dispose of Marina/Marcella, who somehow is linked to a killer who did not kill her. These tangential leads and evidence suggest Jance tossed them in for Beau to investigate and forgot about discrepancies.

When in Seattle to retrieve his sister's remains, Brady by phone tells her deputy, "You're to take no direct action...in regard to Marcella's homicide. She may be your sister, but it's not our jurisdiction and not our case." There is a clever scene at the end. Not giving the last name, Brady tells Tucson DEA agent Delahaney that Marcella had been found murdered near Seattle. Delahaney said, "Are you telling me Marcella Andrade is dead?" Brady reflects, "That meant the agent in charge of the DEA's Tucson office was in on all this." But forensics and good detective work don't solve the crimes, a slip of the tongue does.

With a dozen more truisms like the following, I would have reached into my Star Jar for another. "`I suppose I could lie to him,' Jaime said. `What if I told him I found out about Marco through work?' Joanna stood up. She came around the desk and sat down next to Jaime. `Don't do that,' she urged, placing a hand on his knee. `A lie takes constant maintenance. One thing leads to another until it screws up your life. You know that. It's what you do in interview rooms--you catch crooks in the little lies so you can nail them on the big ones.'"

Melting ice puts out the fire of this 38th Jance novel. This B&B is lucky to be rated two stars.

---Reviewed by L. Dean Murphy

This is my first J.A. Jance book.

I am a fan of authors who weave parallel stories together to create suspense, but this story felt more like Jance bringing two incomplete works together to publish one book. The "parallel" stories skip so often and at such random places that the characters and plot lines are difficult to follow to a reader not already familiar with them. Additionally, Jance throws around so much extraneous information about people and situations inconsequential to the storyline that the book often feels bogged down.

I would not recommend this book to a reader unfamiliar with J.A. Jance's Brady or Beaumont characters.

I've read the lot of the Joanna Brady series. The effort to combine the J.P. Beaumont series with this one is strained and would require superior skill. Unfortunately this writer doesn't have that skill.

The stylistic differences are too great to lend themselves to the sort of herky-jerky switch change that is attempted throughout this novel. Both storylines are fairly complex and deserving of individual treatment. The attempt to combine them is weak to say the least.

In a previous meeting between these 2 characters the author destroyed the integrity of the Brady character in the last 50 pages or so, integrity that had been built in 9 or so previous books. That destruction was gratuitous and not credible. Perhaps the only reason I purchased this novel was that I thought Jance would find a way to rehabilitate the Brady character through her meeting the Beaumont character again. Alas.

The writing is poor. I found myself skimming. The characters are so different, and there are so many of them, and the stories are so different, the attempt to combine them in a 6 paragraphs of one then quick switch to 6 paragraphs of the other is incongruous. This is not 'a real page turner'. You have to work to read this confused and unsatisfying book.

I would never recommend this novel to a friend.

'Fire and Ice' started off strong, and, since this was the first Jance book I've read, I thought the extensive recap of each character's history was helpful(although I can understand why regular readers would find these recaps boring). Unfortunately, the overload of supporting charcters(all of whom have apparently appeared before), and subplots didn't leave room for very much action. While it helped to know that Beaumont and Brady had some 'history' together, this book could just as easily have featured only one of them...or neither!
Once again, it looks like I've stumbled across an 'ongoing series' author who has passed her peak. I'd read earlier books feauring the two leads, even their previous meeting, but it looks like this 'sequel' was written just to make a few bucks and try to get fans of one series to 'cross over' to the other.

In part my mistake. I believed it was a Beaumont novel. If I believed it was Brody or a combination of the two it would have stayed on the shelf.
Sheriff Brody could have been retired long ago. Both characters here have their pasts dredged up one more as in every Jance novel. There appears little to no correlation between the two murder mysteries in two different states. when the disappointing ending came, I found I no longer cared.
Beaumont's character appears to weaken when paired up with Brody. Whichever, the book is a disappointment

Hillary Huber and Erik Davies give very dry readings of this audiobook. I hadn't heard either of them read before and they did not end up on my A-list.
Hillary tends to over-pronounce certain words which gives her characters an unintended "air" about them.

Others have complained about the difficulties following a dual-plot book like this and having the two readers does help keep everything separate (until the plots join) but the whole exercise was tiresome for me.

The conclusion was very unsatisfying. So much about the ending was simply left up in the air, too many plot lines and situations simply left undone. I felt that my time was not well spent on this audiobook.