Name Withheld

I was looking for a Seattle story. This fit the bit, but was utterly blah. Possibly this was just a bad place to start the series. I never connected with the detective; is that because his character traits popped up from out of nowhere in the middle of the story, then disappeared again? So they felt convenient, and he felt like a stereotype? Or maybe I just can't connect with someone who cares so much about his car, planning his trips around it and mentioning its make and model several times a page.

Beaumont is a Seattle detective working on the homicide squad, and in this novel he is faced with a bizarre set of circumstances. A man has ostensibly been killed by being hacked to death with a woman’s high-heeled shoe. This particular woman is also seen leaving the scene of other crimes, and Beaumont soon realizes it must be Jazmyn Day, an excellent singer trying to mak a comeback after recovering from a drug addiction. He’s also mildly in love with her. It soon becomes more complicated as another dead body surfaces, that of a man caught on video at the corporation where he worked, raping a woman friend. Then the man’s wife shows up dead in his apartment.
Jance has some wonderful characters in this book. Grace Highsmith is made show more to be played by Katherine Hepburn. She’s a delight, and the scene where she confesses to the murder in her favorite restaurant, dumping the murder weapon out on the table during a busy lunch, is absolutely priceless. Of course she had nothing to do with the murder, but the denouement takes place at her house and involves her ancient Cadillac. You won’t want to miss this one. show less

Beau’s personal life is in upheaval but he still must deal with murder and more in his work life. There are some very interesting secondary characters in this mystery as well as the main characters that regular readers of this series always enjoy. A floater gets the attention of the police, but the victim didn’t die by drowning. The case take Beau on a roller coaster ride. He needs a new partner; Sue has the chicken pox. It may surprise you who he ends up with. It’s a well written addition to this excellent series - intriguing, gripping, and entertaining.

Early JP but a good one. Lots of interesting characters come and go but the storyline sustains nicely

Relatively confusing. One of the bad guys effectively only appears at the end of story. Spunky great aunt who should get arrested for some things she does.

Name Withheld by J A Jance

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
-Print: COPYRIGHT: 1/1/1996; PUBLISHER: William Morrow & Co; 1st edition; ISBN 978-0688114602; Unabridged (Hardcover info from Amazon.com)
-Digital: COPYRIGHT: 7/2006; PUBLISHER: Harper-Collins eBooks; ISBN 9780061760907; PAGES 400; Unabridged (Kindle edition info from Amazon.com and Libby app version from LAPL)
*Audio: COPYRIGHT: 1/20/2005; PUBLISHER: Books in Motion; DURATION: 10:04:00; Unabridged (Audio info from Amazon.com and Libby app version from LAPL)
-Feature Film or tv: No

SERIES: J. P. Beaumont Series, Book 13

CHARACTERS: (Not comprehensive)
Jonas Piedmont Beaumont-J.P. Beaumont (Beau)—Seattle Washington Detective
Ralph Ames – Beau’s friend and lawyer
Sergeant Watkin (Watty) – show more Seattle Police Sergeant
Captain Lawrence Powell – Seattle Police Captain
Ron Peters – Beau’s partner and friend
Amy Peters – Ron’s wife
Heather Peters – Ron Peterson’s daughter
Tracy Peters – Ron Peterson’s daughter
Roz Peters – Ron’s Ex-wife
Charlie – (Afghan) Dog in residence of Beau’s Belltown Terrace building.
Gail Richardson– Charlie’s owner
Dick Mathers – Manager of Belltown Towers
Audrey Cummings – Medical examiner
Chip Raymond – Detective
Johnny Bickford – Witness who called the floating body in.
Don Wolf – Victim
Lizbeth Wolf – Don’s wife
Bill Whitten – Don’s boss
Deanna Compton – Bill’s assistant
Sibyl Latona (Latty) Gibson – Rape victim
Gail Highsmith – Latty’ Great Aunt
Virginia Marks – Grace’s Private Investigator
Suzanne Crenshaw – Grace’s lawyer
Maribeth George – Television Reporter

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: This was the next one in the series.
-ABOUT: Beau is called out to a dead body floating off Pier 70 with a gunshot wound to the head. Ron’s ex-wife returns from Nicaragua and wants full custody of the girls. Beau’s ex-wife Karen’s health takes a bad turn.
-OVERALL: The plot is great, and J. A. does as great a job as ever of reminding me who people are and things that have happened in the past.

AUTHOR: J. A. (Judith Ann) Jance -- (born October 27, 1944) "Jance was born in Watertown, South Dakota,[2] and raised in Bisbee, Arizona (the setting for her Joanna Brady series of novels). Before becoming an author, she worked as a school librarian on a Native American reservation (Tohono O'Odham), and as a teacher and insurance agent." -- Wikipedia

NARRATOR: Gene Engene -- "Gene Engene is an award-winning reader with an astounding catalog of audiobooks to his credit. He is best known as J.P. Beaumont in the J.A. Jance mystery series. Gene is a veteran stage actor, director, and is a retired Professor of Drama at Eastern Washington University." -- Books in Motion

GENRE:
Fiction; Mystery

SUBJECTS:
Murder; Rape; Business fraud

LOCATIONS:
Seattle, Washington

TIME FRAME:
Contemporary (1996)

DEDICATION:
“To Cessa, and also in memory of Linda Howard.”

EXCERPT: From Prologue
" With Seattle’s New Year’s fireworks display due to begin soon, the Peters girls—nine-year-old Heather and ten-year-old Tracy—and I shut down our Uno game at twenty minutes before midnight. While Tracy put away the cards, Heather and I retreated to my penthouse condo’s kitchen to prepare our celebratory New Year’s drink—Thomas Kemper root beer floats.
This was a first for me. Back in my boozing days, if I had still been standing by the time New Year’s toasts rolled around, you can bet I wouldn’t have been swilling down root beer or champagne, either. MacNaughton’s and water would have been far more like it. Even sober, root beer wasn’t my first choice, but the girls had overruled me on that score.
Their dad, Ron Peters, is an ex-partner of mine, although we’ve been friends now for far longer than we were ever partners on the homicide squad down at Seattle P.D. He and Amy, his second wife and the girls’ stepmother, had splurged on one of those hotel sleep-over New Year’s dinner/dance affairs. With Ron in his wheelchair and Amy six and a half months pregnant, I’m sure the romance end was far more important than either the drinking or the dancing. I suppose they saw their New Year’s night on the town as one last prebaby fling.
For my part, I was glad to step in and play uncle for the evening, letting the girls spend the night in the spare bedroom of my condo in downtown Seattle. We had ordered pizza, watched a couple of videos (why someone doesn’t strangle that little brat in Home Alone I and II I’ll never know!) and played several hands of killer Uno, all of which Tracy won without even trying.
Out in the kitchen, I ladled scoops of ice cream into partially filled glasses while Heather, frowning in concentration, carefully added enough root beer to fill the three glasses with foam without ever overflowing any of them.
“Did you know my mom’s coming back from Nicaragua?” she asked pensively.
Actually, I did. Women are forever complaining about how men never talk about anything important. Loosely translated, that means anything personal. Generally, they’re right. We don’t—not to women and usually not to each other, either.
There is, however, one major exception to that rule. In the not so exclusive fraternity of divorced-wounded men, when it comes to comparing notes on the unreasonableness or capriciousness of ex-wives, man-to-man discussions can and do take place. They tend to turn into impromptu contests—sort of “My ex-wife did this and can you top it” kinds of competitions.
With what was going on down in California, where my ex-wife, Karen, was battling cancer, I wasn’t really playing that game anymore. That fact hadn’t kept Ron from crying on my shoulder when his ex-wife, Roslyn, had resurfaced after a two-year hitch with some far-out “Holy Roller” commune down in Central America.
Earlier that week, minutes after opening a letter from his ex-wife, an agitated, grim-faced Ron Peters had wheeled his chair into my office on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building.
“Damn it!” he had grumbled, waving the paper in the air. “Roz is coming back.”
“So?” I had returned. It’s easy to be unconcerned when the ex-wife in question bears no relation to you whatsoever.
Actually, that isn’t true. I did have a remote connection to Roslyn Peters—as a benefactor. Years earlier, I had stepped in to provide a large chunk of the initial seed money that had shipped her and some of her New Dawn associates off on a mission. They had left Broken Springs, Oregon, and headed down to Nicaragua to establish an outpost for their particular brand of religion among the urban poor in the city of Managua. I provided fully deductible mission “grant money.” At least that’s what my tax return said.
Realistically, my “grant” was nothing more or less than a bribe. In return for a sizable check to the charity of her choice, Roz Peters had relinquished custody of the girls to Ron, their father. Ralph Ames, my Mr. Fix-It attorney, had brokered the deal with the attorney from New Dawn. On the face of it, that sounds pretty heartless—as though the kids went up for grabs, as though they were wrested from a caring, loving mother and auctioned off to the highest bidder. The reality was a little different from that.
New Dawn isn’t the worst cult there’s ever been. As far as I know, nobody’s died in it, or because of it, so far. And when I came up with the idea of getting the girls back and asked Ralph to see what he could do, he set off for Broken Springs, muttering a string of weasel words and saying the whole scheme didn’t stand a chance in hell. But once he got there and saw how things were—the primitive housing and sleeping arrangements as well as what passed for hygiene, food, and medical care—he turned into a regular legal tiger. He raised so much hell that the New Dawn attorney couldn’t get him out of town fast enough. When Ralph came back to Seattle from Oregon, the girls came with him.
“Well,” I had said to Peters the previous week, “I suppose it was bound to happen eventually. You didn’t expect her to stay down there forever, did you?”
“I had hoped,” Ron said, his black look telling me that he had much preferred having the better part of a continent between himself and his ex-wife.
“According to her, New Dawn is planning to start a mission down in Tacoma,” he continued. “They’re taking over a derelict old church down in Hilltop.”
In recent years, Hilltop has turned into a volatile multiracial neighborhood, the kind every American city seems to have these days. Similar in racial and socioeconomic makeup to Seattle’s Rainier Valley, Hilltop has been plagued with more than its fair share of violence and gang warfare. It shows up in newspaper articles and on television news broadcasts, usually in conjunction with stories recounting the sad aftermath of yet another drive-by shooting or drug deal gone bad. It’s the kind of place where armed kids insist on using other kids—preferably unarmed ones—for target practice.”

RATING:
4 stars

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
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