Rating: 
Summary: Beaumont Returns after a hiatus
Review: Some years ago, a salesperson at a local mystery bookstore recommended a pair of books by an author I had never heard of named J.A. Jance. They were detective novels with a Seattle setting, and they were good police procedural stories. The first one had quite a dramatic ending, and the later ones were very good. I especially enjoyed the laid-back matter of fact writing style of the guy who wrote the books. They are told in the first person, and you can almost hear J.P. "Beau" Beaumont telling you his story. Imagine my surprise five or six years later when the author turned out to be a woman.Jance has turned into a writing machine. She started out doing paperback originals (the publishing version of a movie going straight to video) and has been on the NYT bestseller list in hardback several times, recently. This is the fifteenth in the Beaumont series, and she also has 8 books in a second series, and two stand-alone suspense novels. All throughout, the books are basically even. She has gotten better, but the progress has been very slow. Mind you she started out very good, so it's not like there was a large area for improvement here. And there are the usual slight fluctuations where a book is better or worse than the previous one. The last Beaumont book ended with a tragedy that he wasn't able to prevent, and so this one starts with him having retired from the Seattle P.D. after many years, taking a cruise with his grandmother and her new husband, chaperoning them, so to speak. Naturally nefarious people are on board the ship, and naturally when they try something evil, Beau has to step in and try and stop them. Jance is very good at putting red herrings in, making things seem something that they aren't, etc. The plot does get a little slow, and I wouldn't say this is her best book, but she's good enough that her best is still pretty good.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book by Jance!
Review: This was my first J.A. Jance book, and the first book that I have read in a long time. This story is great, I could not put the book down. I look forward to reading more J.P. Beaumont Mystery books in the future. I would definitaly recommend this book to anyone!
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