Mysteries Galore.com

Reviewed by Caryn St. Clair

Fire and Ice brings together Jance’s two most popular protagonists uniting Seattle’s J.P. Beaumont and Cochise County, Arizona’s Joanna Brady. When they were last pulled in on the same case, there was a bit of electricity between the two both professionally and personally leaving readers wanting more. And now we have it.

Beaumont’s case involves a string of brutal murders of Hispanic women killed, then dumped and burned. Brady is investigating a cold-blooded attack on the caretaker for an ATV Park located in a Dunes area. Was the attack random or by an environmentalist group? There is also quite an ugly eldercare issue involved. Unlike their first joint venture in Partners in Crime, Jance takes her time merging the separate cases together in this book, leaving readers with a constant shift between two seemingly unrelated cases being handled by two very different departments. The shift between the two cases often occurs within the same chapter as well, giving readers the feeling that they are literally reading two books at once until quite deep within the book.

While the delay in linking the two cases together should have resulted in a clear “voice” of each of the protagonists, it somehow worked the other way, leaving readers without any depth to either Brady or Beaumont. This was especially true of Beaumont. The Beaumont books generally have had a harder edge to them missing in the Brady series. This is because the character himself has been a hard drinking, driven character in contrast to the wife and mother Joanna Brady, who also happens to be a sheriff. In the more recent books however, Beaumont has gotten sober and softer. By the time readers get to Fire and Ice, Beaumont is lounging around at Disneyland-something totally unthinkable of the protagonist in the older books. While this “new” Beaumont worked well with Brady in Partners in Crime, it just didn’t seem to gel as well this time out. Still, the cases are interesting, and Brady and Beaumont-even a softer, gentler Beaumont, are worth visiting in Fire and Ice.