Queen of the Night

Starred review from May 24, 2010
Dedicated to the late Tony Hillerman, Jance's brilliant fourth suspense novel featuring former homicide detective Brandon Walker and his wife, novelist Diana Ladd (after Day of the Dead), spans some 50 years, from a murder in 1959 in San Diego to a rash of killings in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and Tucson, Ariz., in 2009. Interwoven with these crimes are legends of the Tohono O'odham Indians (aka the Desert People) and the lives of such contemporary Native people as Lani Walker, Brandon and Diana's adopted daughter. Jance's masterful handling of a complex cast of characters makes it easy for the reader to appreciate the intricate web of relationships that bind them across generations. The title refers to the night-blooming Cereus, a desert plant that blooms once a year and is of great symbolic importance to the Tohono. Jance, perhaps best known for her J.P. Beaumont series (Fire and Ice, etc.), has crafted a mystery that Hillerman would be proud of and that her fans will love. 7-city author tour.

Jance's mystery revolves around the night-blooming cereus flower and features legends of the Tohono O'odham Indians. The story bounces erratically from a senior Tucson couple on an anniversary picnic to local law enforcement, an unrelated decades-old murder, and a villain on a killing spree. Greg Itzin does an admirable job keeping up, although the listener will need to keep a scorecard until the last couple hours of the performance. Itzin wisely refrains from overperforming Native American dialects, opting instead to vary his pitch and speed slightly for each character. When all the story lines come together in a neat package at the end, the listener breathes a sigh of relief. R.L.L. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 1, 2010

Jance offers that rare--and welcome--hybrid: the suspense novel with heart.

Jonathan Southard is one of those unhappy men whose unrequited love affair with life has caused a volatile, long-term, internal simmering. One day the mixture explodes, resulting in a crime that is both horrific and, in a sense at least, foreseeable. He shoots his wife, her dog and their two young children, construing this last as an act of mercy inasmuch as it will spare them an aftermath of humiliation and shame. Having wiped out his San Diego family, he sets off for Tucson and the home of his mother, planning to clean the slate. He's always hated Abby Tennant, attributing to her voluminous maternal shortcomings, of which she is largely innocent. With less difficulty than Southard expected, the bodies are discovered, clues are put together, identities established and soon enough the manhunt is on, participated in by multiple police forces from several states. Among these are the elite Shadow Wolves, Indians who patrol reservation land near the Mexican border. Enter Dan Pardeey. Half Anglo, half Apache, he has a special connection to the small survivor of another of Southard's monstrous crimes. Angelina Enos, age four, has remained alive only by virtue of being tiny enough to escape notice. Eerily, this parallels Pardee's own long-ago experience, and when she reaches out to him he has no choice but to respond. Because he does, his life is irrevocably changed and, in a kind of chain reaction, so are the lives of a variety of other players, one way or another, for good or ill, in Jance's absorbing cast.

A storytelling machine, Jance in her 41st (Trial by Fire, 2009, etc.) is at the top of her game and just about irresistible.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2010
Murders old and new disturb the peace of Tohono Oodham Nation residents and their Arizona neighbors in this fourth entry in Jances Walker Family series. Californian Jonathan Southard is so seething with resentment that he kills his wife and children and goes after his remarried mother in Tucson. Reverberations from Southards crimes touch the former sheriff Brandon Walker, his wife, Diana, and their adopted Native American daughter, Lani, exacerbating old wounds at a time when Walker is worried about Dianas mental health. Perhaps as a way of reacquainting readers with this seriesthere have been lapses of three to four years between installmentsJance inserts great chunks of backstory, as Diana hallucinates dead men who once terrorized her. Tohono Oodham tales and culture, which permeate the book (reminiscent of Tony Hillerman), and the flower of the title, the beautiful and aromatic cereus, which blooms in the desert just one night each year, add appeal, but the awkward backstory gimmick and the lack of much narrative pulse make this a somewhat tepid entry from a best-selling author.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)