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DEAD WRONG
by J. A. Jance
William Morrow, July 2006
362 pages
$33.50CDN
ISBN: 0060540907


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Sheriff Joanna Brady has quite a lot on her plate. First, she is expecting a baby any minute now, but is unwilling to take maternity leave a minute earlier than she needs to. Then there is the border situation in her corner of the Arizona desert, which has meant that some of her officers have been re-assigned at the request of Homeland Security to strengthen the country's defences against illegal border-crossers. If that hasn't left her short-staffed enough, one of her deputies has gone down to prostate cancer and an animal control agent is found beaten half to death.

And then there's her domestic situation -- her husband is off to a crime fiction convention to flog his forthcoming thriller and his loathsome parents have descended, uninvited and unwelcome, to park their RV in the front yard and criticize Joanna at every opportunity. A lesser woman might pack a bag, head for a comfy hotel in Tucson, and let someone else deal with it all.

But Joanna believes her job is to 'avenge man's inhumanity to man with justice', and straps on her Kevlar vest and gets on with it, with good humour and determination. There is quite a bit to get on with -- first a corpse turns up minus his fingers that were 'savagely' hacked off (I'm not sure how one does this in a humane manner, but never mind) in order to prevent easy identification. But there aren't all that many people in this neck of the desert, so he is quickly revealed as an ex-con who was convicted of killing his wife and served a long stretch for the crime.

Joanna has trouble keeping her mind on this case while her animal control deputy lies close to death in the hospital, the presumed victim of a local gang who are running illegal dog fights. Can Joanna avenge her deputy, find homes for a lot of abused pit bulls, and solve the murder of the fingerless man, all before having her baby? You betcha!

Joanna's detested mother-in-law is contemptuous of mysteries, even though her son has written one. "Too light," she says, "no literary merit." Unfortunately, DEAD WRONG is precisely the kind of thriller that provides ammunition for literary snobs. Brady's domestic problems seem introduced as makeweight; her in-laws appear and depart equally abruptly and to little purpose. Joanna is herself far too formidable for comfort. Unlike the pregnant lady cop in FARGO, she does not see her situation as ever so faintly absurd.

There is small attention to psychology or motivation here -- even when all is revealed, the reader is not clear enough about the reasons for all the murder to feel satisfied. Still, this book, the 12th in the Joanna Brady series, has joined its predecessors on the best-seller list, so presumably there is a vast contingent of mystery readers out there who would disagree with me.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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