Customer Reviews

Paradise Lost (Joanna Brady Mysteries, Book 9)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Reading the first paragraph of a J.A. Jance novel quickly tells you that a pro is at work. After penning over two dozen mysteries this author knows how to pace suspense, and when to surprise. Her characters are not larger than life but ones to whom readers can easily relate. As if this weren't enough she spins a topnotch yarn.

With "Paradise Lost" the sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, Joanna Brady, attempts to track down a ruthless killer. But this time it's more than just sleuthing as usual because the murder victim's body was found by Jenny, Brady's 13-year-old daughter.

In one of thrillerdom's greatest mismatches, Jenny has been paired with Dora Matthews for a weekend Girl Scout campout at Apache Pass. While Jenny is guileless, innocent, Dora is a pregnant young girl with an absentee father and an out-of-touch drug addicted mom. When the girls take an after lights out walk they find the body of a Phoenix heiress.

It is not too long before tragedy also befalls the unfortunate Dora. What more does Brady need to realize that a whacko killer is on the loose, doing in any potential witnesses, perhaps her own daughter?

Jance shines with descriptions of the stark Arizona terrain, and excels at drafting pedal to the metal suspense.

When her daughter and a fellow scout find a corpse, and then the fellow scout is killed, Sheriff Joanna Brady springs into action. She means to protect her daughter no matter what and no sacrifice, even promises to her new husband, will get in the way. Brady goes after the killer(s) with dogged determination and all of the scientific help modern criminal labs can bring to the table.

Like some of the earlier Joanna Brady mysteries, I did find some missing details here. Whatever happened to Maggie MacFerson, for example, after she threatened to destroy Brady's career? Because Jance does such a fine job in developing her characters and because she adds true emotional intensity to the involving mystery, I found I didn't mind.

Jance does an excellent job interweaving the mystery with the emotional and personal lives of her characters. As Brady is losing the race with the murders, she is also losing her connection to her mother, her daughter, and her husband. The harder she tries, the more she risks everything she wants out of life. Resolution of these personal matters is every bit as important as the resolution of the mystery, and Jance does a fine job delivering a satisfying conclusion to both.

This is a readable, but, I'm afraid, a not very complex or suspenseful thriller featuring Cochise County, Arizona Sheriff Joanna Brady. Joanna's teenage daughter and her bad-girl tentmate Dora sneak away from Girl Scout camp and stumble across a woman's battered body. Only days later, Dora is also murdered, which makes Joanna logically fear that her daughter will be next. There are a few twists and turns in the story which will keep you going even though you have probably figured out who did it quite a bit before.

The location is nicely rendered, with the added nuance that, due to the rural nature of Cochise County, characters are constantly driving from one place to another. This gives Jance the opportunity for some neat place-setting touches.

But there is a lot of telling rather than showing characters' feelings and motivation, and many of the minor characters are weakly developed. In three lines of dialogue, one character goes from "she said" to "she wailed" to "she whispered" in what is surely an impossibly rapid rollercoaster of emotion. There is a lot of that "he said boldly" and "she said sadly" kind of writing in "Paradise Lost" which relaxes whatever emotional grip the book might get on a reader.

J.A. Jance is already a bestselling author, but a good editor should be working with her to bring her writing to another level and earn her a wider readership.

to her heroine in the Joanna Brady series. Brady, the sheriff of Cochise County not only solves some pretty tough crimes with a lot of personal involvement in this novel, she has a new emotional mix to balance. With her new marriage and a "house husband" and a daughter who is just beginning the throes of teenage angst, Brady exhibits some of the emotional stress that comes with the territory of being a wife, mother and career woman.

Jance once again treats us to the wild beauty of the deserts she was raised in, while giving us some reality of the tedium/political balance and danger that involves police work, particularly for women in management. Brady is drawn in a more complex faction, and Jance is wise to insure that she makes some mistakes and acts in ways that we shake our heads at from time to time. The supporting cast is also strongly drawn, and its nice to not like Jenny, Brady's daughter very much -- the writer gives a picture of a real teen, not just an accessory to the family. Jenny's personally involved in finding the first of three bodies in homicides that occur in a few days in Cochise County. The murders, which appear to be related, are, in a sort of "domino theory" way. In addition, the problems of meth labs in the wilderness, unregistered aliens and carjackings in southern Arizona are highlighted, helping the reader understand what a difficult piece of real estate Brady has inherited as sheriff.

In this book, we actually get some insight and humanity from Brady's mother, Eleanor, for the first time! Eleanor's own second marriage is described in realistic terms, as is the infighting and small conflicts of the sheriff's troop.

I'm always anxious to buy and consume a new Jance novel; her heroine has not grown stale and shows promise of more complexity and action-oriented stories in the future.

Great read!

This sprawling mystery has a soap opera feel to it. Sheriff Joanna Brady doesn't just solve crimes. She is newly remarried, mother of a sensitive 12-year old daughter, has an irritating mother, and what looks to be a househusband. I felt the walls of resistance rising against slogging through this type of story. But Ms. Jance is an experienced spinner of tales, and I became involved almost in spite of myself.

Joanna's daughter and tent mate discover a brutally murdered woman while at a Girl Scout camp out. The girls snuck away after to lights out to smoke cigarettes and encountered a body instead. For a while there, I didn't know which caused more consternation; the discovery of the body or sneaking smokes. But when the daughter's tent mate is found dead in suspicious circumstances, things heat up. Joanna's understaffed department is confronted with a possible serial killer, a car jacker, and the daughter's safety. While the serial killer plot is fairly transparent, the death of the 13-year old tent mate is not. Ms. Jance does an excellent job of unfolding clues and motives perfectly paced and well placed.

The author's strength is in her story telling abilities and her obvious love of the desert locale. Her weaknesses are dialogue and male characters with as many dimensions as volleyball. The husband is a marvel of patience and understanding, her chief deputy is robotically perfect at following orders and her former father-in-law is a lovable old geezer. Too much of the book takes place in a car. Apparently Sheriff Brady does not believe in phones (though she is forever on her cell phone), faxes or even inquiring as to whether someone is at home before sending half her staff whizzing across state while she takes off in the other direction. But even with these shortcomings, the story moves along and keeps the reader engaged. I think "Paradise Lost" would be a good Young Adult selection.
-Sweetmolly-Amazon.com Reviewer

This was my first Sheriff Brady mystery, and I would be willing to pick up another if the circumstances are right. Paradise Lost is a decently written page-turner which kept my interest much more than I expected it to do.

There are lots and lots of stones that you could throw at the book. The resolution at the end is annoyingly complete for everybody, with even the annoying mother being rehabilitated. Butch Dixon does not seem to have a flaw. Her daughter is amazingly understanding and contrite. I guess that kind of happy ending goes with the cozy territory, so I will not complain too much.

Jance seems to work less in traditional cozy whodunnit territory, and is more interested in incorporating the mystery aspects of the sheriff job with the personal ups and downs of her life. Think of it as a kind of cozy procedural and you will get the picture.

The writing is not elegant, but good enough to keep the plot moving. This would be a good book to waste a few hours or as a gift for the younger teenager who is just starting to explore the mystery genre.

This series has been going on for a long time now. I first read a J.A.Jance novel when she had only a few J.P.Beaumont novels. No one even knew that she was female, because the books had been released as paperback originals, without author photos in the back of the books. I've been following her ever since.

Jance is a serviceable, if not brilliant author. Her writing style is pretty good, though her ear for dialog is only so-so. Where she's strongest is characters and plots. This book is no exception. The main character, Joanna Brady, is the housewife-turned-sherriff who works to run her department and solve crimes.

In this installment, Joanna's daughter and a classmate sneak off from a camp-out to smoke a cigarette and find a dead body. The victim is a middle-aged former spinster who's lost her fortune to a fortune-hunting husband, who's now apparently lured her to her death, or at least that's what everyone thinks. Joanna works her way through the mystery, interviewing witnesses and suspects, and listening to reports from detectives and so forth who do more of the same.

This is not the strongest of the Brady books. For one thing, the series was better when she was a younger sherriff, and the men in the department were somewhat suspicious of her. She has to prove herself. Now she's done that, and so things are somewhat more tepid. Instead, she has ups and downs with a new husband, a daughter who's growing up, and so forth. They don't add to the story as much as they might.

That being said, this is still a good book, and a worthy addition to the series. The plot's not entirely predictable, and the story takes some twists and turns that are fun, to say the least.

If you love the Brady series, then get ready for the best of the bunch. Joanna Brady is juggling her new marriage and sheriff responsibilities in this well written tale involving a series of related, or possibly unrelated murders. Her own daughter, Jenny, gets caught up as a possible target in this one, adding to the suspense.

There's something about J. A. Jance's style that captures me. The feeling of reading this book reminded me of the feel of a comfortable set of old shoes. The characters are very appealing, and I can't wait for the next entry to see them mature and progress, and solve crimes along the way. If you want a hard-boiled detective story, then you may not like this book, but for me, nothing beats the Arizona heat. Keep 'em coming Ms Jance!

This is my favorite Jance series. I think with each book we see Joanna mature. And now with Butch, we see her struggle to be sheriff, wife and mother. He has to struggle to be a sheriff's spouse -- with all that comes with that. It was neat getting to see how she saw herself back as a child in how Jenny felt now. I think she needed to remember.

The Arizonz scenery is great as always. Joanna's co-workers are maturing in each book as well. I feel she has a much better raport with them now. Which is how real life is, too. This is a well-written series. Great book.

... well, at least in part because it's written as if for an old pulp magazine which paid by the word -- never say in ten words what can be expanded to twenty or thirty. It's a perfect book to practice your speed reading, hitting the highlights with occasional dips into the glutinous morass of its prose.

Read in this fashion there are nuggets of interesting plotting. The main plot of three murders in sleepy Cochise County, how they are linked, police procedure, and their eventual resolution holds together surprisingly well and is at least as convincing as usual for mysteries. For at least one aspect you actually do have the crucial clue somewhat in advance of the solution, but mostly there's little of the 'whodunit' to the book -- we have to wait along with the protagonists for the crucial information from lab or database, at which point the next step is obvious. But some of the numerous subplots seem rather overheated and certainly unnecessary. The book isn't "intricately plotted" so much as it just goes off in several scattered directions at once. But unlike, say, Joseph Hansen's "Job's Year", this conflation of one awful event after another in the life of Sherrif Brady, her family and department, does not seem to be a theme for the book -- merely,as the Publishers Weekly review indicated, a dip toward soap opera.

But the writing, oh the writing. Whenever I slowed down enough to notice, it was all I could do not to run for a blue pencil (I do plan to sell this book .. definitely not a keeper). Not only is the prose inflated, bordering on bloviation, but we are constantly told what to think about something rather than simply presenting an observation: "... the woman who stepped out wore a bright yellow sundress and matching hat. The ladylike attire stood in stark contrast to the rest of her outfit, which consisted of thick socks and heavy-duty hiking boots." Far better to simply show us the boots and leave us to notice the contrast. And the department's unmarked cars must have been referred to as Crown Victorias .. or the cutesy 'Civvies' .. several hundred times (yet never once explaining little details like why they were driving this model, or why we should care; it's not even 100 per cent clear these weren't patrol cars). I could go on and on, but suffice to say it was a battle between screaming and gritting my teeth.

I've read some of Jance's previous work and though hardly eloquent don't recall it's being this badly written. Let's hope this is a temporary lapse .. or that she finds an editor who actually edits.