J. A. — Judith Ann — Jance’s “Dance of the Bones” is the second selection in the Star’s “We Read” online book group.
We’ll be reading J.A. Jance’s new J.P. Beaumont and Brandon Walker suspense novel and posting blogs, making comments and asking questions. We will also collect questions for Jance to answer in an upcoming online chat.
Jance’s 51st novel, which teams two of her series characters, Seattle detective J.P. Beaumont and Arizona sheriff Brandon Walker, went on sale Tuesday.
Jance pulls her popular protagonists out of retirement and plops them amid two cold cases that are more than 1,600 miles apart and into a current case involving two missing boys, one of whom has ties to the Walker family. The duo must stop a sociopathic smuggler who has skipped out on justice for decades.
Her J.P. Beaumont novella, “Stand Down,” published in July, is an apt, albeit brief, 86-page prelude to “Dance of the Bones.”
“It’s an important part of Beau’s saga,” Jance says of “Stand Down” on her Facebook page. It’s published in e-book and paperback formats.
Jance has a deny-the-deniers backstory.
A 1962 graduate of Bisbee High School, she received an academic scholarship to the University of Arizona and was the first person in her family to attend a four-year college. She wanted to be a writer since the second grade, but was denied admission to the UA creative writing program because she was told girls “ought to be teachers or nurses” rather than writers, Jance has said in talks and on her website.
She graduated in 1966 with a degree in English and secondary education, and in 1979 earned a masters in library science. She taught high school English at Pueblo High School for two years and was a K-12 librarian at Indian Oasis School District in Sells for five years. Her experiences on the reservation are evident in the details of her Arizona-set books and in “Dance of the Bones.”
Denied a spot in the creative writing program, Jance said she did the next best thing: married a man who was allowed in the program. “My first husband imitated Faulkner and Hemingway primarily by drinking too much and writing too little,” she said.
After receiving a favorable letter in 1968 from an editor in New York interested in publishing a children’s story she wrote, Jance’s husband told her that “there would be only one writer in our family, and he was it.”
She wrote poetry at night after her husband was asleep, which was published in “After the Fire.” They divorced and her husband died of chronic alcoholism at 42. Many readers will recognize the effects of alcoholism that percolate to the surface in some of Jance’s books.
She started writing in 1982 with a slightly fictionalized version of a series of murders in Tucson in 1970 that was never published. A single, divorced mother with two children and no child support, she wrote her first three books between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m., after which she woke her kids, got them to school, and went to work selling life insurance, her day job that paid the bills.
J.P. Beaumont series book No. 1, “Until Proven Guilty,” was submitted in 1985, using only her initials because her agent thought editors would be more inclined to accept the book if the author’s gender were ambiguous.
She married Bill Schilb about 28 years ago. The two split their time between Tucson and Seattle, which is punctuated by a couple of months of book tours each year.
Jance also writes the Joanna Brady series, set in southeastern Arizona, and the Sedona-set Ali Reynolds books, inspired by popular newscaster Patty Weiss. Jance also has four thrillers to her credit.
Fans note that they enjoy Jance’s plot twists that are not out of orbit, relatable characters and sense of place. Readers often comment on spotting real-life locales in her books.
“Mysteries are supposed to be fun. They are storytelling,” Jance said in 2013.
Go to jajance.com or follow our blog and post questions for Jance at tucson.com/bookfest
