Beaumont, Brady unite in Jance’s ‘Fire and Ice’
J.A. Jance should essentially double her already prodigious popularity with her new mystery, “Fire and Ice” (William Morrow, $25.99).
The book brings together her two usually-separate protagonists – Seattle investigator J.P. Beaumont (the hero of 18 Jance novels) and Cochise County, Ariz., sheriff Joanna Brady (the heroine of 13 others).
“When the galleys for the last Joanna Brady book showed up in my life, I realized that there was one part of the story that had never been resolved,” Jance said, by phone from her home in Bellevue. “When you get to the galleys stage, you can’t make huge changes. So what I decided to do, I said, ‘Well, Judy, you have another book to write and you have the beginning of the story right there.”
This is only the second time that Jance has brought together Beaumont and Brady, the first time being in “Partner in Crime.” She said mixing her two fictional works was both fun and challenging.
“It’s challenging because the timelines in the two sets of books are very different,” said Jance. “It’s always a challenge to see that the people from one series are the right age for the other series. Yes, it’s fiction, and you would assume that the author gets to be in charge of the timeline. But you would be (and here she emits a comically exaggerated sigh) wrong.”
In this book, Beaumont is investigating a string of horrific murders in the Cascade Range. Meanwhile, Brady is investigating the murder of a caretaker of an ATV park in Arizona. These two investigations gradually merge into one harrowing case.
“Fire and Ice” was already shooting up the Amazon rankings on Tuesday, its first day in release. It should cement Jance’s reputation as Seattle’s mystery queen (she splits her year between Seattle and Arizona).
She has come a long way since 1985, when she published her first J.P. Beaumont mystery.
“When I first started selling books, I had original paperbacks that were published with little note and almost zero critical acclaim,” said Jance. “And we went all over Washington, Oregon and California, doing book signings, driving our cars into the ground. But those book signings created the audience. This time, when we fly to Spokane, we will be flying over on our corporate jet. Not the publisher’s corporate jet. Ours.”
She still remembers the moment when she realized she had turned the corner.
“It was in 1994, when we got a book offer that actually made my husband’s hair stand straight up on his head. He said, ‘Wait a minute. If I keep on working, my whole salary is going to go to taxes.’ So he quit working and started learning how to play golf.”
He also learned how to manage the business side of her career, which he does to this day.
“I think that if success had walked up and hit me immediately, without my doing 25 years of work in the meantime, I might not be as grateful as I am right now,” said Jance. “The people who have always read my books and know all the characters — and talk to me about the characters — those are the people who have made my husband’s and my life possible. I am incredibly grateful to those people.”