Suspense

(2003) Another very good Sheriff Brady story as she tries to figure out who killed a dog hoarder that results in 17 dogs dying in the hot Arizona sun. Carol Mossman's daughter of incest turns out the culprit as Brady uncovers a web of an incestuous cult that wants to keep their crimes a secret. In the meantime, she helps suss out a coyote ring that has killed many immigrants as they try to slip across the border.BooklistNo 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.

When a dog hoarding woman with close to 18 dogs is murdered Sheriff Joanna Brady has a mystery to solve and two dogs that she could not resist taking home herself. The murder victim we learn had escaped from a polygamy cult with her younger sisters some years before. Who killed her and why. Was it her cult polygamist father who molested her or someone else. Other things happen in the midst of this including a van full of undocumented people crashing on the highway with multiple deaths, Sheriff Brady's campaign for re-election and her finding herself pregnant. Will she work out all this and find the killer before more people are murdered? ( )

survivor of polygamist cult is murdered

Sheriff Joanna Brady has her hands full with an election campaign, unexpected pregnancy, and her house-husband Butch's frustrating career as a novelist. But when a woman is killed and her seventeen dogs die in the woman's non-air-conditioned trailer, Brady is plunged into mystery. The first murder is followed by two more--with the same weapon signature. But the deeper Brady digs, the uglier she things look. The dead woman was already a victim--of child abuse so severe it made her incapable of holding a steady job and turned her into a hoarder for dogs. Brady swears she'll find the killer, but can any punishment be enough for what has happened?

An ulterior motive with this book is to describe a mental illness called "hoarding", in which usually an unbalanced loner starts accumulating far more animals than they can begin to feed or care for properly. Using the ploy that the county Animal Control operation has recently been turned over to the sheriff to manage, she and we learn about the difficulty in placing animals for adoption and the surprising number being put to sleep every week. Pictured on the back cover with two dogs, it's clear Jance makes a compelling case for more awareness of the issues and the funding such shelters really need.

A hard book for animal lovers to read but a message that was clearly conveyed. ( )