Denny's Law

March 23, 2009
Det. Sarah Burke gets a lesson about Arizona’s struggling construction industry and family greed in Gunn’s taut second police procedural to feature the Tucson cop (after 2008’s Cool in Tucson
).
When someone shoots arts patron Eloise Henderson to death along with her one-night stand, an ex-con-turned-stagehand, the obvious suspect is Eloise’s husband, with whom she’d been having marital problems. As Sarah and her team begin to investigate Eloise’s past, other possible suspects emerge. Meanwhile, caterer Zachariah Cristofou, prompted by society and theater gadfly “Madge,” concocts a scheme to frame a naïve stagehand, Pauly Eckhardt, for the murders, a plot that goes awry when one of the principals starts spilling the beans. Fans of Cool in Tucson
will enjoy catching up with Sarah’s earnest efforts to make a real family for Denny, the daughter of her drug-addicted sister, and her relationship with fellow cop Will Dietz.

October 10, 2016
Gunn’s enjoyable sixth Sarah Burke police procedural (after 2014’s Red Man Down) finds the Tucson, Ariz., homicide detective, her mother, boyfriend Will, and niece Denny settled under the same roof. It’s the Fourth of July, and before Sarah can get out the door for what promises to be a whiz-bang family picnic, duty calls. An elderly man appears to have been beaten to death in his home in one of Tucson’s poorer neighborhoods. The case gets complicated when not so much as a Medicare card or cell phone is found on the premises. Worse, the victim appears to be someone who kept to himself; not one of the neighbors even knows his name. Gunn, however, knows enough about how to drop a clue here, a hint there, a diversion somewhere else to keep the reader guessing. As Burke and her team slog up one blind alley and down another, tension builds apace, all juxtaposed against her otherwise tranquil domestic life. Agent: Jane Chelius, Jane Chelius Literary Agency.

October 1, 2016
A Tucson police detective catches a murder case that is anything but ordinary. Sarah Burke is called to a crime scene after a neighbor reports a violent fight. The victim, a 60-ish male living in a simple home in an ordinary neighborhood, wasnt robbed, and the fact that his face was beaten to a pulp indicates rage rather than greed as a motive. The neighbor tells the police that the fatal fight broke out as a noisy parade was going by with the distinctly odd figure of a limping clown bringing up the rear. The discovery of a bloody clown suit in the trash suggests that there was nothing casual or sudden about this murder. The dead man is identified as Calvin Springer, but no Social Security or Medicare cards are found in the house. What the team does find is an expensive gun and a large amount of cash. The autopsy shows that Springer was shot in the head by a .22 caliber gun, though not by the one found in his house, before he was beaten. A visit from Don Belgrave, of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, reveals that Springer was almost certainly laundering money for a drug cartel in a touchingly old-fashioned way, using an adding machine and paper records. Although ICE is following the money trail to the cartel, Sarah thinks the very unprofessional murder looks more personal. Finding out who Springer really is will be the key to the crime, but hes hidden his past so well that it will be no easy job even for Sarahs dogged, experienced team. Gunn (Noontime Follies, 2015, etc.) has produced an expert police procedural with plenty of quirks and twists that raise it well above the average.

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December 1, 2016
It's a striking image: a lone clown limping behind a mariachi band in an Independence Day parade. The picture turns sinister when the discarded clown costume is found blocks from where a man was murdered during the festivities. The identity of the killer isn't the only mystery. The driver's license found on the victim says Calvin Springer, but the coffee cans full of bank notes hidden in Springer's ceiling lead the cops to believe they've found the body of a different man. Mabel Conway recognizes a picture the police put out and thinks that the victim might be the man she and her late husband befriended when they boated around Mexico 20 years ago. Tucson police detective Sarah Burke spends her days trying to piece together the loose ends of this conundrum of a crime and her nights using a much softer interrogation technique on her niece, who has suddenly clammed up about what's made her suddenly want to quit the swim team. A great recommendation for fans of J. A. Jance's Arizona-set mysteries.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)