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DEN OF INIQUITY by J.A. Jance William Morrow, September 2024 368 pages $30.00 ISBN: 0063252589

For awhile, Jance felt it necessary to include Beau's entire backstory in her novels. Thankfully, that urge no longer drives Jance's plot. As a result, there is room in DEN OF INIQUITY to develop a panoply of interesting characters and to ask really difficult questions about domestic abuse and about crime and punishment. In particular, Dear Reader, when I say domestic abuse, are you assuming that a woman is abused by a male partner? What if things are not as our prejudices have painted? When I say, drug abuser, fentanyl overdose, do you think to yourself, that an OD is just thinning the herd? Jance's new novel addresses these issues.

Dramatis personae: J.P. Beaumont, Seattle Homicide, ret'd, S.H.I.T. squad, ret'd., private investigator, Mel Soames, Chief of Police in Bellingham, Washington and Beau's wife; Kyle Cartwright, Beau's grandson, senior in high school, who has run away from his parent's home and come knocking on Beau's door; Karen Cartwright, Beau's daughter, who has moved out of the house she shared with her husband and son; Jeremy Cartwright, said husband, Kyle's father, who has invited his most recent sexual conquest to live with him; Caroline Richards (a pseudonym), Jeremy's love interest, pregnant, gold digger; Darius Jackson, Jake Spaulding, Loren Gregson, Xavier Jesus, all dead of a fentanyl overdose, all of whom have two crisp $100.00 bills in their wallets, all accused of domestic abuse; Darius' grandmother, who asks Beau to discover why her son died; mysterious homeless woman, white hair, pushing a grocery cart, elderly, serial killer, and in the past, William Landon, now dead, involved in a notorious bank heist for which the money has never been recovered.

Jance's new novel shows the strengths of many of her previous works, that is, an ability to create a little world and people it with interesting people. As we begin, Beau's grandson Kyle appears at Beau's home, many miles from where Kyle's parents live, asking for shelter. Kyle's father has invited his love interest to share the family home; both Kyle's mother and Kyle have bailed out of an unsavory situation. Through this subplot, Jance comments on what obligations children and parents have to one another, and when those obligations cease. Beau, curious about what Kyle's father has gotten himself into, begins to investigate his love interest and finds her background to be not at all what she said it was. Kyle, a senior, comes home from his new school in Beau's neighborhood as COVID closes the nation down.

Jance frequently juxtaposes police business against a plot which examines family ties. For Den of Iniquity, that plot begins with a string of murders which appear to be fentanyl overdoses by people who somehow “deserve” their deaths: homeless people, those out on parole, the angry, ignorant, jobless. However, the deaths have troubling similarities. Beau, latching into his work with TLC, The Last Chance, a cold-case citizen's group, has help sifting through data and developing DNA profiles which begin to reveal the emotional driver of the murders.

Jance's book is marketed as a thriller. It is not. "Police procedural" would be a better category. Jance's strengths are to develop many believable characters to whom real-seeming events have occurred; and to create a string of clues that good police work must follow before coming to a solution. These strengths obtain here. I stayed up at night reading my copy and I suspect you may do that as well.

§ Cathy Downs is professor emerita, English, American literature, Texas A&M University-Kingsville. These days she makes quilts, cultivates a garden, remodels a home, feeds the cats, and enjoys dipping into reading of the mysterious kind.

Reviewed by Cathy Downs, December 2024

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