Joanna Brady's Back, Dealing with the Sad Remains of Innocence

Remains of Innocence - J. A. Jance

Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady’s morning began with one of those phone calls she dreaded: a child was missing. This case was a little different, since that particular child was chronologically well into his fifties. Within hours, the developmentally-disabled man’s body had been found; the remains of small, tortured animals beside it.

Had the man everyone in Bisbee believed a gentle giant been keeping a dark secret? Or was the artsy former mining town home to an incipient serial killer? The first answers would have to wait until the coroner performed an autopsy. But there was a little problem: he, too, was dead - murdered, in fact. On the opposite side of the country, Liza Machett had her own problems: while cleaning out the family home her dying mother had turned into a hoarder’s dream, she made a fascinating discovery. Mama had been hoarding more than old magazines; she’d been hoarding old hundred-dollar bills. Hundreds of hundreds, in fact. But when that old money began circulating after its long rest, Liza’s life became complicated. In the extreme: people around her began dying.

So Liza ran west toward the only family member she had left, her half-brother Guy Machett, MD, the coroner of Cochise County, Arizona... uh-oh.


Remains of Innocence marks the sixteenth installment in J. A. Jance’s Joanna Brady series. The series is unusual mainly for its setting in the vast open spaces of Cochise County, an area bigger than Connecticut with a population of a bit more than 150,000 souls. Like most cozy and semi-cozy mysteries (just about all female protagonists except perhaps V. I. Warshawski), the Brady series prominently features the main character’s relationships. In the case of Brady, the most important relationships are her family (second husband Butch, teenage daughter Jenny and infant son Dennis), her mother and her girlhood best friend. In other words, the Brady series is character-driven.

With a pair of near-simultaneous murders to solve – one a county criminal official – Brady’s department and its chief must kick into high gear. That means lots of trips to the closest crime lab in Tucson and plenty of transcripts of cell phone calls made from the road (why Brady doesn’t have a charger in her official vehicle remains a mystery…).

Jance, happily (unlike Kathy Reichs or Sue Grafton), doesn’t yield to the temptation to connect the two crimes into some sort of vast web of conspiracy and coincidence. On the other hand, the lack of connection leaves very little working space for red herrings and other important components of the mystery genre. In fact, the identity of the killer of the local citizen is patently obvious within the first few chapters, leaving nothing but the inevitable chase scene for the final reel. On the dead coroner front, Brady’s team does some fairly good (and a little  lucky) detective work, but the resolution of that crime is entirely off-set. Neither requires much thought to figure out, which – unfortunately – is the point of reading a “mystery.”

Much of the text is given over to moralizations about poor parenting and spousal abuse – not that there’s anything wrong with reminding people to be good parents and not abuse their loved ones, but for this reader’s money, Jance got a bit carried away (at least it’s not as bad as the Ali Reynolds series). In comparison to some of the self-published pap (like this or that) I've been reading lately, however, it's definitely a pleasure to read something constructed and written by a pro.