Book review: 'Downfall,' by J.A. Jance

Sheriff Joanna Brady, of Cochise County, Arizona, investigates a possible double homicide when the bodies of two women are discovered at the base of a cliff. No gunshot or knife wounds. A single car and campsite nearby, and a phone with several unanswered calls identify one body’s address in Tucson, a hundred miles away, and one of Joanna’s deputies is sent there to notify next-of-kin. The other body has no ID, but fingerprints taken at autopsy match those of Mrs. Susan Nelson, a school teacher at a charter school in nearby Sierra Vista.

Joanna and a deputy go to her husband, the pastor of a small congregation in that town. Reverend Nelson is relieved to learn his wife is dead; she has been nothing but trouble to him for the past four years. When Joanna asks where he wants her buried, he is dismissive. “The nearest landfill, for all I care,” he replies.

At the school where she taught English and coached the state champion debate team, faculty and students alike are devastated, and can’t praise her enough. But no one the detectives question can offer any information connecting the two women. The one from Tucson was a graduate student at the U. of Arizona, doing research on a rare variant of cactus found growing at the top of “Geronimo”, as the locals call the small mountain where the women died.

The two boys who discovered them had been on their way to swim in a small pool nearby, and had been prompt and cooperative in notifying the police. The crime scene yielded no evidence beyond the cell phone and wounds consistent with the hundred-foot fall to the rocks below the cliff. Security cameras at Susan’s school show her walking out of the school Saturday afternoon in the grip of a tall man whose face is obscured by a hoodie. It looks like the whole school, faculty and students will have to be interviewed. It also raises the issue of a possible kidnapping, which brings in the FBI from their Tucson office.

Joanna already has a lot on her personal plate: sending her nineteen-year-old daughter Jenny off to college, her five-year-old son Denny to start kindergarten, being five months into her third pregnancy, and making arrangements for a memorial service for her parents, both of whom died in a freak highway accident on their way home from vacation in Minnesota. But she is the sheriff of a large county, and has a job to do.

Five booths are set up in the school library next morning, each with a trained homicide investigator. Debate team members are seen first; they had closest contact with their coach, who has often given them individual sessions after school. At the end of the day , only one or two students maybe should be re-interviewed. The debate club members thought Susan walked on water and took an active interest in their lives. Susan’s fellow teachers also spoke of her favorably. One teacher who had co-chaired last spring’s junior/senior prom with her, remembered that Susan’s husband demanded his wife be removed from the committee because he believed dancing was the devil’s handiwork. Susan had commented later that her husband could be “a real jerk on occasion.”

As Joanna is getting into her car, a student approaches her. “Sheriff Brady? Can I talk to you for a minute?” She recognized him as Kevin, a student who had once interviewed her for his journalism class. “I didn’t exactly come in for an interview . . .”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not a snitch and because I didn’t want to get someone else in trouble.

“But you want to talk now?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because Mrs. Nelson is dead, and I may know who did it.”

According to his story, Mrs. Nelson had been having an affair with his sixteen-year-old buddy Travis for the past year and she had become pregnant. Travis had asked her to marry him; she had refused. “Now I’m scared,” Kevin said.

“Scared that he killed her?”

“Scared that he might maybe kill himself. That’s what he said he was going to do if she wouldn’t marry him.”

Sheriff Brady had contacted parents prior to the interviews that day; now she got a search warrant for Susan Nelson’s home. One of Susan’s bedroom drawers held a collection of intimate letters from quite a few of her students, some of whom had already graduated. Susan appeared to be a sexual predator, preying on her teen-age students.

Joanna has an ever-widening group of “persons of interest”, including a new homicide by a grand-mother-like golfer, who freely admits killing her husband with a golf club on hole seven in front of witnesses. Joanna knew how Susan Nelson was killed, and probably why, but still no “who.”

She is in her office clearing up paperwork and having a last-minute conference with her chief deputy, Tom Hadlock. She will be off work Friday for her parents’ memorial service. She clears her desk, turns out the lights and steps outside to go to her car. Someone fires a taser at her shoulder. She falls on her back, cracking her head on the sidewalk. That’s when everything went black.

J. A. Jance has written more than 60 novels including more than a dozen featuring Sheriff Joanna Brady in Arizona and two dozen of Detective J. P. Beaumont in Seattle. Her writing is notable for both the strengths and weaknesses of the characters, and the life-like functioning of the police with whom they work. Ms. Jance has given several book readings and signings in Spokane, and her knowledge of Seattle and Washington State qualifies her as a regional author.