Rating: 
Summary: J. P. Beaumont returns
Review: Like an old friend, J. P. Beaumont returns in this latest addition to the J. A. Jance series about the feisty detective. In this book, Beau has retired from the Seattle Police Department, but crimes continue to follow him. He is accompanying his grandmother and her new husband on a cruise ship during their honeymoon. Not wanting to interfere with their privacy, Beau requests dinner seating at another table and manages to end up with four single women and a single man. One of the women disappears and is is soon obvious that several people on the ship have a motive to kill her. FBI agents and security people are working on the case, but as usual Beau is way ahead of them. The background of an Alaskan cruise adds extra appeal to this well-written mystery.
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: boring
Review: this book started off very slow, nothing happens 'till a third of the way through the book. the writer seems to think she can write from a male perspective but this guy doesn't think like a guy at all. way to descriptive of things that don't benefit the story. i felt like i was trapped on a cruise ship with all these old people and i couldnt get off. it barely held my interest enough to finish it.
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!
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!
Rating:
Summary: Too Many Inconsistencies, Stretches
Review: This was my first J.A. Jance novel, and if I had only this to go on, I probably wouldn't read another. Fortunately, other readers here have indicated it may be weaker than her usual work, so I'll give her another shot or two. First off, what is the reason for the title of the book? Okay, it's set on an Alaska cruise, and birds of prey (such as Bald Eagles) are abundant in Alaska. However, birds are not even mentioned in the book, and, as far as metaphors go, I don't believe any of the murder suspects on board could be thought of as predators. Second, I didn't believe Beau's explanation for being on the cruise ship in the first place. His newlywed grandma wanted him there in case she or her groom took ill or something. Don't they have medical doctors on board (or in nearby ports) for that very reason? What more could her grandson provide? And even if you swallow that, why would Beau sit at a different table from the octogenarians at dinner? He says it's to give them their privacy, but heck, he's already on their honeymoon cruise with them, and it's not like they're not sitting with a bunch of other people anyway. Jance's explanations for things that have to be a certain way to further the plot are too thin -- I could see right through them. I wish she'd found another way -- surely Beau could have been seated separately due to a cruiseline screw-up or something. Another thing: Beau takes an immediate dislike to Margaret Featherman, and it's hard to see why. He goes on and on about how obnoxious she is when they meet at dinner the first night (they're seated at the same table). But try as I did to find evidence of her awful behavior, all I could find her doing before Beau expresses his dislike is 1) ask him what he does for a living, and 2) indicate the empty chair next to him and ask if his wife will be joining them. How dare she! Margaret exhibits behavior later that is indeed questionable -- she just doesn't do so before Beau makes up his mind about her. Finally, the reader who earlier questioned the ability of one victim to fall off a cliff from inside a tunnel was right on the nose. That IS how it happened. I wondered about it myself, but as logistical things are not my strong suit, I doubted my own conclusions. This book is not without its charms, but it is flawed. I can recommend it, with reservations, to diehard Jance fans who never miss her work, and to readers who are interested in one of the settings (the cruise ship OR Alaska). Jance is not a very descriptive writer, but I enjoyed reading about these places anyway.
Rating: 
Summary: First time reader of J.A. Jance
Review: This was the first book I read by J.A. Jance. I enjoy a good detective story. J.P. Beaumont was a likeable character; a retired cop. (It's funny how a cop tries to go on vacation or retire, but the crime always find the cop anyway). The setting on a cruise ship bound for Alaska made this story different from most. The story was interesting but I felt bogged down by so much background and detail on non-essential people. There seemed to be a lot of setting up of things we just didn't need to know. Then later in the story a character, who we have no background on, just plops in and suddenly becomes very important. This was frustrating. Why spend so much time setting up all those other characters, then not set this one up at all? I was disappointed with the ending. It came too fast without enough information to back up the resolution.
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