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Summary
Summary
It was love that brought young Brianna Bree O'Brien to Skeleton Canyon for a romantic tryst with her adoring boyfriend, Ignacio Ybarra - a rendezvous the beautiful teenager would never live to experience. It was love also that compelled Joanna Brady to seek - and win - the office of Cochise Country Sheriff: love of her murdered policeman husband, whose memory she was honoring; of her little daughter Jenny, for whom she was now solely responsible; and for justice and truth. It is the truth about that terrible night in Skeleton Canyon - a night that witnessed the cruel death of an innocent girl - that now concerns Joanna, even as she struggles to come to terms with her own enduring grief and loneliness. Bree's distraught parents are convinced Ignacio is the killer - that the boy was enraged by their refusal to condone his relationship with their daughter. But the sudden disappearance of a friend - combined with startling revelations gleaned from a chance encounter - suggests to Sheriff Brady that there is much more involved in this case than passionate anger and forbidden love. And her investigation is beginning to expose a complex web of crime and deception that stretches from an isolated desert canyon to the luxurious O'Brien family compound, Sombra del San Jose. For nothing is exactly as it seems in either locality. And Joanna is suddenly in danger of discovering first-hand that lies, both criminal and seemingly innocent alike, can have devastating - and deadly - consequences.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Jance is an expert at writing rich mysteries filled with as much human decency as skullduggery. When high-school valedictorian Bree O'Brien is found dead in the southeastern Arizona mountains, suspicion falls on her boyfriend, Ignacio Ybarra, who refuses to explain his fresh cuts and bruises. But the case isn't that simple, as Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady learns in this fifth adventure (after Dead to Rights). Bree and Ignacio had been meeting secretly because her wealthy father hates Hispanics. When Ignacio is cleared, Joanna suspects that another case may be connected with the homicide. Someone has been smuggling Freon across the border, cashing in on high black-market prices for the refrigerant. Are Bree's parents involved? And would any amount of smuggling money make them kill their own daughter? Why did O'Brien hire an ex-cop with an unsavory past who often leered at Bree? And why did Bree write in her journal, "My mother is a liar"? Joanna tackles the cases while still coping with the loneliness of her recent widowhood and a startling personal revelation about her mother. This is a solid yarn with strong characters and a full palette of local color. Jance's regional knowledge runs deep, whether she writes about troubled Anglo-Hispanic relations along the border or the surprising power of Arizona thunderstorms. 100,000 first printing; major ad/promo. (Aug.) FYI: Skeleton Canyon will be simultaneously published with the mass market reprint of Dead to Rights. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A year after they played Romeo and Juliet at summer camp, recent Bisbee High grads Brianna O'Brien and Ignacio Ybarra are at it again, this time for real. Nacio's aunt and uncle think the secret romance is a bad idea, but their disapproval is nothing compared to wealthy, crippled rancher David O'Brien's racist roars of outrage--outrage he directs unabated at Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady (Dead to Rights, 1996, etc.) when Bree goes missing from the cozy campsite where she'd been waiting au naturel for Nacio. Even the dullest reader will have surmised that Bree is dead, but Jance keeps this revelation from Joanna and her overworked deputies for nearly half the running time of this overextended tale, leaving only the second half for Joanna's tangle with a black-market Freon dealer; her ever-surprising mother's latest bombshell; the romantic misunderstanding between former prostitute Angie Kellogg and bird-loving naturalist Dennis Hacker; the skeletons tumbling out of the O'Brien family closet; and, almost as an afterthought, Bree's murder (which turns out to have been committed by the Arizona version of the wandering tramp so beloved of country-house whodunits). Most of the sitcom-shaped intrigues are so lightweight that the homicidal complications seem to have been airlifted in from Jance's tougher, stronger J.P. Beaumont series (Name Withheld, etc.). (First printing of 100,000)
Booklist Review
Jance's latest Joanna Brady mystery has the Arizona sheriff investigating the horrible murder of beautiful, popular teenager Bree O'Brien, whose body was left in the desert for the coyotes to devour. Her parents, friends of the governor, demand quick action, but the case is a puzzle. As Joanna investigates, she finds that the young girl had secrets to hide, not the least of which was her friendship with a young man of Mexican descent. But her parents also had secrets, and as Joanna discovers from the journal Bree left behind, it may have been Bree's knowledge of her parents' secrets that led to her death. Joanna is an appealing, "just folks" heroine with the same doubts and problems as the rest of us, and Jance manages to inject her stories with a depth of emotion, compassion, and understanding that make them more intriguing than the standard fare. An engaging read in a series that just keeps getting better. --Emily Melton
Library Journal Review
Joanna Brady, sheriff of Tombstone and star of Jance's award-winning mystery series, is summoned to the murderously hot Skeleton Canyon to investigate a killing. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.