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Desert Heat
Desert Heat
Desert Heat
Audiobook7 hours

Desert Heat

Written by J. A. Jance

Narrated by Hillary Huber

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

A cop lies dying beneath the blistering Arizona sun—a local lawman who may well have become the next sheriff of Cochise County. The police brass claim that Andy Brady was dirty, and that his shooting was a suicide attempt. Joanna Brady, his devoted wife and mother of their nine-year-old daughter, knows a cover-up when she hears one . . . and murder when she sees it. But her determined efforts to hunt down an assassin and clear her husband's name are placing Joanna and her surviving family in harm's way—because in the desert, the one thing more lethal than a rattler's bite . . . is the truth.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperAudio
Release dateOct 20, 2009
ISBN9780061953873
Author

J. A. Jance

J. A. Jance is the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, the Ali Reynolds series, six thrillers about the Walker Family, and one volume of poetry. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, she lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington.

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Reviews for Desert Heat

Rating: 3.7555147735294114 out of 5 stars
4/5

272 ratings11 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Excellent writing by j.a. Jance as always and I love the characters. The reactions and the plot are a little weak. Sometimes the reaction characters have are aggravating and you see where the story is going long before anyone else even when you know logic should have gotten them there
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Life is good for Joanna Brady in the small desert community of Bisbee. She has Jenny, her adored nine-year-old daughter, and solid, honest, and loving husband, Andy, a local lawman who's running for Sheriff of Cochise County. But her good life explodes when a bullet destroys Andy Brady's future and leaves him dying beneath the blistering Arizona sun.The police brass claim that Andy was dirty -- up to his neck in drugs and smuggling -- and that the shooting was a suicide attempt. Joanna knows a cover-up when she hears one...and murder when she sees it. But her determined efforts to track down an assassin and clear her husband's name are placing herself and her Jenny in serious jeopardy. Because, in the desert, the truth can be far more lethal than a rattler's bite.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Desert Heat is the first book in the Joanna Brady series. It begins with Joanna waiting impatiently for her husband who has promised to be home on time to take her out for their tenth anniversary. The Cochise County Deputy, who is also running for Sheriff, had special plans but he’s hours late. Becoming worried, Joanna heads out in her car looking for him after finding out he’d left the station hours ago. She finds him shot and is barely alive just off the road. Almost before he is transported to the hospital, rumors begin to circulate that Andy is a good cop turned bad and that he tried to commit suicide rather than to risk having his illegal dealings with drug smugglers exposed. Of course, Joanna doesn't believe any of the rumors and sets out on a mission to discover the true story and to find Andy's attacker.

    There are plenty of surprises in this book and even though we know from the beginning who the murderer is, the motive for the murder remains a mystery until the end of the book. Joanna is a very likable character. She’s vulnerable but both tough and determined. She's an engaging character but the secondary characters need some filling out. This is quite usual in the “first” book of a series so I'm not going to let that deter me from reading the next one. I lived in Tucson for almost forty years and traveled to Bisbee several times. It's obvious Jance has lived in the area and her inclusion of local landmarks made this a very enjoyable read for me. Desert Heat is a quick and enjoyable read for those who enjoy a good mystery set in the desert southwest.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    IMO, not an impressive start to a detective series featuring widowed Joanna Brady. Writing was workmanlike but characters weren't fleshed out. Our protagonist was dull and boring and peripheral figures flat. One or two action scenes near the end were well done, but not enough here to make me continue with the series.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    My usual genre is not the mystery and suspense realm these days, but I remembered how much I enjoyed them when I was younger. This means I'm trying out many of the adult versions.I'm having to give the author a little benefit of the doubt, this being the first in a long running series. She needs to establish the base arc and all that. But it's moving so SLOWLY. It's feeling like I'm climbing toward a cliff. Too many of the questionable elements appear too soon. The lantern hung on one character is obviously made to distract from the actual bad guy. Not sure I like the alternating point of view, but I'm dealing. Sadly, I guessed the bad guy almost as soon as he walked on scene. I'd pegged the sheriff as an accomplish somehow, but didn't have the exact ending figured. One character is a touch of an unintelligent twit if she thinks the culprit has no contacts anywhere. She may have caught a ride with one. I'm going to push ahead with the next book in the series. Honestly, if we can't get better at plotting and hiding the bad guy than what I've seen so far, I might stop after book 3.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Origin stories, of which this is one, are always tricky to write: It's easy to spend so much time introducing the main character and their world that the story itself gets shunted to the sidelines. That's the case--and then some--in Desert Heat, which spends so long showing us how Joanna Brady went from 20-something wife, mother, and white-collar employee to (incipient) sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, that it never gets around to making us care about that transition. The mystery is sketchy at best, it's solved less through detection than revelation, and the last loose ends are tied up in an out-of-left-field coincidence that would have made Dickens blush.None of this would matter if Joanna was a bold, vivid character--as Kinsey Milhone or V. I. Warshawski were in their first outings, or Vic Moretti was in the first Walt Longmire novel--but she's as flat and generic here as the heroine of a TV movie. The supporting characters are competently drawn stock characters, but no more than that. If all of them, from Joanna's perfect 9-year-old daughter to her crusty-but-lovable neighbor, vanished before the next book, I wouldn't miss any of them for a moment.Does the series get better? Probably. But the mystery-fiction world is full of series that I haven't read yet, either, and are better (far better) from the get-go.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Detective Andy Brady is almost dead and it looks like attempted suicide, especially when undiscovered facets of his personal life lend weight to this interpretation. However, his wife Joanna cannot accept that version of events and attempts to prove his innocence in small town Arizona. Interesting characters and many real locations add to the plot which keeps you, more or less, guessing up until the end.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The first book in the Joanna Brady series, we start off with Joanna waiting on their tenth anniversary for her husband to come home. The Cochise County Deputy—who is running for Sheriff—had special plans for them that night, but he’s hours late. Becoming worried, Joanna heads out in her car looking for him after finding out he’d left the station hours ago. She finds him. He’d been shot and is barely alive just off the road. What doesn’t make any sense to her is that the police are convinced that this is a suicide and he’d not only been involved with drug running, but believe he killed another and she’s being looked at as some kind of accomplice. Joanna isn’t buying any of it and is determined to find the killer.What’s cool about this story is that the reader is aware of who the killer is in the prologue with the mystery being how Joanna will discover the truth and how she’ll get evidence to prove her husband is innocent even with so many things pointing to his guilt.I’d been able to read books 13 and 16 in this series for free, and liked them so much I had to go back and start at the beginning. So in some ways this review reflects the series and not just this story. Joanna is a very likeable character. She’s tough and determined, but also vulnerable and must balance what she needs to do with her home life. In this case a nine year old daughter who is lost with the sudden death of her dad. She’s ever conscious of being as honest and level-headed as she can be with her daughter, especially considering how Joanna was raised by a still-nagging mother.The personality of the characters are interesting, some of whom I recognize from the later books, and I thought the mystery angle was well done. I zipped right through this story. We know from the series that she becomes the Sheriff, so it’s no surprise by the end of the story that people approach her and ask her to run. But what we get with this first story is a great understanding of who Joanna is, what her abilities are, and why becoming Sheriff would be good for the county.Already knowing what her character is like with book 16, I can’t wait to read the progression of events and her own growth that I know will take place through the rest of the books.Read as a library book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Joanna Brady's husband is dead and the facts of the case are making him into a man she never knew. She is out to find the truth, wherever that leads.Having read Tombstone Courage first, I really wasn't looking forward to reading this. I thought it would be redundant and too sad. However, I'm glad I did read it. It gives me good insight into the way Jance develops her characters and I'm looking forward to that in the rest of the series. It was sad. The places I cried at were the scenes with Andy's father and the old neighbor rancher. I'm a sap for good men well written. The author has a way of showing the grief experienced by her characters in a realistic way.It isn't really a hidden mystery, yet it is still fun to watch how it is revealed in the story. I like Joanna Brady. She is a no-nonsense woman but has just enough flaws to make her believable.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a brand new series to me, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. Joanna is an interesting character. Younger than you would expect, strong-willed, smart, and dedicated to her family. They rally around her, even though they’re grieving too. The mystery is compelling, though there are a lot of pieces that have to be woven together. The reader knows rather early who actually killed Andy Brady, but what we don’t really get until the end is the why. The end is a nice lead-in to the rest of the series.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Joanna Brady is Judy Jance’s Arizona detective, forced into that role in this first book of the series when her husband, a Cochise County sheriff’s deputy, is murdered and his death made to look like a suicide. Worse, there is evidence that Andy Brady was also involved in drug smuggling.Jance was not new to mystery writing when she published Desert Heat in 1993; she already had ten books in a series about a Seattle detective named J. P. Beaumont. But the setting of this book returns to the area where she grew up, in southeastern Arizona, in the copper-mining town of Bisbee and the surrounding Cochise County. Part of the book is set in Tucson as well, and since I grew up in southern Arizona, I keep trying to read mysteries set there, just because it’s pleasant to come across familiar places when I’m allowing my imagination to inhabit the scene of a book. Unfortunately, not every Southwestern author writes like Tony Hillerman, and I have put down quite a few of these local mysteries after ten or twenty pages of mediocre writing. Jance is a good writer, though, and a good deal of the interest I found in this book is in the way she has constructed it. The book has a structure I would call comic. I don’t mean that it’s funny, but rather that it has a plot arrangement that shows up in Shakespearean as well as classical Greek and Roman comedy. Before the reputation of the good guy even begins to be threatened by the bad things he seems to have done, we have already been shown that someone other than the villain knows the truth and can eventually reveal it. This is reassuring for the audience or the reader. So it may be a test for Joanna Brady to continue to believe in her husband with each new revelation that seems to incriminate him, but we readers never doubt him and know the truth will out. In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, for instance, we know that the accusation against the beautiful young heroine will come to nothing because the police have already captured the drunken bunglers who helped to manufacture the evidence against her.In Desert Heat, Jance concentrates on two characters, Joanna Brady and the woman who has unwittingly become mixed up with Andy Brady’s killer. In different ways, each finds more strength of character than she thought herself capable of. And if you want to know how the series will continue, let me give you this hint: Joanna Brady’s father was sheriff of Cochise County, and her husband Andy was running for sheriff when he was killed. As one of the characters says, “sometimes the best man for the job is a woman.”