The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Collateral Damage (17) (Ali Reynolds Series) by J.A. Jance

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Collateral Damage (17) (Ali Reynolds Series) by J.A. Jance Ali Reynolds and High Noon Enterprises face the dangerous consequences of one man’s desperate search for revenge in this unputdownable thriller from J.A. Jance, the New York Times bestselling author who “has been delivering must-read books for a long time” (The Real Book Spy). After spending twenty years behind bars, Frank Muñoz, a disgraced former cop, is out on parole and focused on just one thing: revenge. The wife who abandoned him after his arrest, the mistress who ratted him out for abetting a money-laundering scheme, the detectives who presided over his case all those years ago—they all have targets on their backs. About: Judith Ann Jance is an American author of mystery novels. She writes three series of novels, centering on retired Seattle Police Department Detective J. P. Beaumont, Arizona County Sheriff Joanna Brady, and former Los Angeles news anchor turned mystery solver Ali Reynolds.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, The Chris Voss Show. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you here.

The greatest show on earth, assembling the greatest audience known to man on earth, or something like that. I love you all. That's the most important part of that whole message, even though it's a little bit of hyper-bullish. Is hyper-bullish a word, or is it just hyper-bull? I don't know. I flunk college. But we have a literary giant on on the show and clearly it's not

me jay chance one of my favorite authors uh she's been on the show three or four times now and i love having her on every time she's always angelic glorious she has so much of a storied history and she's written more books than i think just about anybody at this pace uh but we'll talk to her about that here in a second she is launching launching today, or I'm sorry, not today, but she's talking to us today about her new book that launches on March 14th, 2023. Her new book is Collateral Damage. It's part of the Allie Reynolds series,

book number 17 in that series. And so you're going to order it up. And we've had her on the show multiple times. So if you get a chance, Google the other shows that we've had with her. She joins us on the show. She's the New York Times bestselling author of a ton of books. I know this number here is probably old. They put on Amazon.

She writes contemporary mysteries in four different series. She's a voracious reader. She wanted to be a writer from the moment she read her first Wizard of Oz book in the second grade, always drawn to mysteries from Nancy Drew right through John D. McDonald's Travis McGee series. It was only natural when she tried her hand at

writing her first book and it would be a mystery as well. She went on to become a New York Times best seller with the J.P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, three interrelated thrillers, including The Walker Family and Edge of Evil. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, she lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to the show, Mrs. Jantz. How are you? I'm just fine. You said I was a literary giant, and actually that's true. I'm 6'1". And when people meet me in person, they say, well, you don't look that tall in your cover photos.

Well, the cover photos are usually sitting down. It's just a headshot usually on cover photos. So there you go. Maybe you need to put a photo of yourself on the back of the thing with like a measuring tape or like standing next to a door so that people. No, I think I'll pass on that. I'll just let them be surprised. I mean, really, it's your work. It's your writing that is the big thing that is the attraction to people.

So there you go. I mean, people, you know, I'm 6'1", too. And so I think it's 6'1", 6'2", somewhere in the middle there. Depends if I stand up straight, like my mom told me when I was young. But, you know, people still think I'm, you know, I'm brilliant. No, they don't. I'm just kidding. Mrs. Jantz, give us your dot coms, wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs and stuff.

Where can they find me on the internet? Yes, dot coms or whatever website. Just tell people to go buy the darn book already. I'm at jajantz.com. And I post a weekly blog. It posts every Friday morning. And this week, it's a look back at last week's Tucson Festival of Books, which was an amazing event with more than 100,000 people showing up at the mall on the University of Arizona campus. Happens to be my alum, and I'm always happy to go to Tucson. I had been really looking forward to Tucson in the spring,

and so I was a little surprised that it snowed in Tucson the night before I got there. They were probably surprised as well. But it was actually on the lawn of the Arizona Inn. When I checked in on Thursday night, there was actually a snowman. I've never seen one of those on the croquet court before. But by Friday, the snow was gone, and the weekend was simply glorious. There you go. So, you know, you've written on your Amazon page, it says you only have 47 books.

And I know it's in the 60s. That's wrong. That's wrong. I actually have, this book is number 64. There you go. And the book that's coming out in September, Blessing of the Lost Girls, will be number 65. And the miracle is all of my books are still in print because I never let my original publisher.

All of the books are still there. For years, people have told me, reading your books is like eating Fritos because you can't read just one. For me, that's wonderful because if I hook a reader with a new book, they've got a lot of black backlist to go back through there you go you're like a drug dealer of mystery novels you're getting people hooked somebody actually asked me if there was a 12-step program for jhs books and i said no not that i know of no is he the one

who had the alcoholic issue we talked about that on some prior shows that's jp beaumont yeah he my first husband died of chronic alcoholism alcoholism at age 42 a year and a half after i divorced him and so when i started writing about jp beaumont the story was in the first person and he was supposed to, he was a cop, but he couldn't be a cop all the time. So writers write what they know. And I knew a lot about drinking. So he did the kind of drinking I had lived with for all those years. Well, what I didn't realize and what my readers did, I was creating, I was writing from a model of a problem drinker. And in the fourth book, when the fourth book came out, people started pointing out that they thought J.P. Beaumont had a problem. So that was book four.

He went into treatment in book eight. So I'm writing Beaumont number 26 right now. Oh. So he has been in recovery a lot longer than he wasn't. But I still have people who tell me they liked him better when he was a drunk. I have some rock and roll bands that I like better when they're drugging and boozing days. But, you know, it's probably better that

he's off the sauce because, you know, now he'll live longer continuing your books. He's having some time to deal with the things he did wrong in an early life. But I wrote nine Beaumont books in a row and I was tired of him and I threatened to knock him off.

And my editor said, well, write something else. So I wrote the first Walker book, Hour of the Hunter. And that was told through multiple points of view with an elastic band for a timeline. And writing that was like going on vacation. Well, then when I went back to Bo, it was fun again. And my editor said, okay, come up with another character so you can alternate. I did that. And that was where Joanna Brady came from.

But by the early 2000s, I was tired of all of them. I was just done. And so my then editor said, well, come up with a new character. It can be a new character. Come up with a story. Write a book and have it here by the 1st of January. It can be new character, old character, set it wherever you like, and we'll publish it as an original paperback. Well, it was May. I can write a book between May and January. So I said, sure.

So they sent me a contract. I signed it. They sent me a check. I spent it. And then I had a problem because I had no idea who I was going to write about. So June and July passed. August and September passed. Suddenly it was the middle of October, and I had no idea who was going to be in the book that was due in New York by the 1st of January. We were in Tucson at the time.

We sold our Tucson resident just before COVID, and it's a good thing. We wouldn't have been able to get there. But we were in Tucson. So one Thursday, I was having a serious case of writer's block. So I went to the family room. I turned on the noon news. And Patty Weiss, my favorite Tucson news broadcaster, was there. She went to work in television news in Tucson when she was still a student at the U of A. So I watched the noon news.

When the 5 o'clock news came around that evening, I still had writer's block, so I went to watch the 5 o'clock news, and Patty Weiss had vanished from the screen. She wasn't on assignment. She wasn't on vacation. She was just gone. So over the weekend, we discovered that between the noon news and the five o'clock news, her useful new news director had come to her desk, told her she was too old to be on TV, and escorted her from the building. It's a bad idea to make mystery writers mad. That was Thursday

afternoon. And by Monday, I was writing about a character named Allie Reynolds being yanked off her news anchor desk in L.A. for the same reason. That was the first Allie Reynolds book. Collateral Damage is Allie Reynolds number 17. So she's been around for a while. She came back to Arizona and in the first Allie book, Edge of Evil, and started trying to duct tape her life back together. And she's now established she has a new husband. She has a new role running a cybersecurity program, a company with her new husband.

And her life has changed considerably. There you go. So you're still discovering this and flushing out this character. That's a good note I'll make to myself. Never piss off a mystery writer. It's good advice actually.

I'd probably end up on the being one of the people who die in the thing. I'd be like that Star Trek character that always goes down to the planet and wears the red shirt and never comes back. That's usually me. Red shirts. You'd be fine. So give us a flesh out of the story.

What's inside and what's entailed for your character, Allie, with this book? Well, the thing about this book is it's the book out of all 64 of them, actually 65, that took me the longest time to write because it took one whole year from March 2021 to March 2022. And it was just an incredible, I couldn't get the story to move. I couldn't get it to come together. Now, my husband is a retired electronics engineer. And engineers fix things. And he's more from being an electronics engineer to being my literary engineer.

For an earlier Alley book, I couldn't make the end come into focus. So I had him read it, and I said, please tell me how to finish this book. And he read it. And this is all he told me. He said, well, why don't you do it the easy way? And so I did.

What is the easy way? Well, you have to read Deadly Stakes. Oh, you have to read the book. I see what you're teasing and sitting up here. Okay. Because I was having such a tough time with it. I finally, after the book was about a third written,

written and I gave it to Bill and I said, please read me, read this and tell me what you think. So he had it for quite a time. And finally he gave it back to me and he said, and this is a direct quote, this is a mess. I can't read it.

Well, at least he was honest. He is a very brave man, and he is an honest man. Most husbands don't survive that sort of thing. That's what makes him so valuable. So I tried to read it, what I had written, and he was right. It was a mess. I don't know if you went to Sunday school, but one of the songs back then was, the wise man built his house upon the rock. And that was the problem with this book. The book was built on sand. I knew who the bad guy was, but he hadn't shown up in person.

And so I hadn't seen him in the flesh. My readers hadn't seen him. And that was why the book wasn't going anywhere. So I had to go in and do a complete rewrite and bring him into focus so the book could move forward. So by the time I finally sent it in, I thought, oh, this has taken so long. My editor is probably going to read it and just say, you know, we want our money back. I doubt that. But I had a brand new editor, so I sent it to her,

and she got married the next week, and she went on her honeymoon. So instead of having an editorial letter back in a couple of weeks, it was over a month before it came back. When I sat down to work on it again, I had been away from it long enough that I thought, well, this isn't as bad as I thought it was. And now when readers are telling me that they haven't been able to put the book down, that they've stayed up late reading it, that it's really fast-paced, the author doesn't always know what's going on. There you go. So why did you title it Collateral Damage?

Where does that title come from? Tease out a little bit of the meaning. In the very first scene, Allie's husband, B. Simpson, is on his way to London for a conference, a cybersecurity conference. And Hal Holden, who runs a sort of private shuttle company, picks him up at home and is driving him to Sky Harbor from Sedona to Sky Harbor in Phoenix. And a big old truck gets in behind them

and is just right on the tail of it. Hal Holden drives this classic Lincoln Continental from back in the old days, a big hunk of American-made sheet metal. And so this guy is just all over his bumper. Well, once they get headed down I-17, the guy forces them off the highway. And Hal Holden and B. Simpson

are both injured seriously enough that they're airlifted to the hospital. And so B. Simpson is sort of a high profile guy. And when they determined that this was not an accident, it wasn't an accident. This was a deliberate vehicular homicide attempt. The local law enforcement assumes that B must have been the target and that the driver was merely collateral damage. Allie Reynolds, with the help of her cohorts at High Noon at their cyber security

High Noon Enterprises. I lost the name for a moment. Names come and go if you have too many floating around in your head. They start an investigation on their own with the help of High Noon's Pet AI. Their artificial intelligence is named Frigg.

And Frigg came into being through my literary engineer. I'm sitting next to him. He's watching TV in the family room. I'm sitting next to him typing. There were seven kids in our family, and we all did our homework at the kitchen table while our mother was making dinner. So I can work in a certain amount of chaos.

So if he's watching TV, it doesn't bother me. But I'm sitting there minding my own business. And he says, you know, AI is sort of interesting. You should write about AI. And I said, are you talking to me? I'm a liberal arts major. What do I know about AI? So he started giving me articles on AI.

And I read them. He maintains that I have a wearing blender inside my head, and information comes into my head however it comes in, either seeing it or hearing it or reading it. But when it leaks back out through my fingertips into the keyboard, it's fundamentally changed. So I learned about artificial intelligence. But by the time I went through the Waring Bl a wannabe serial killer. Ah. So Frigg's deep learning is all about learning things she isn't supposed to learn and doing stuff she isn't supposed to be able to do.

So Allie is able to use AI, Frigg's capabilities, but she can't reveal her source because most of what Frigg does is absolutely illegal. Oh, wow. So this story is a story of a revenge killer, a guy who spent 20 years, the better part of 20 years in prison, thinking about how he's going to get even with the people who set him up. And the book starts with a homicide in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There's another homicide in Pasadena, California.

There's the wreck on the Arizona Highway, and there's someone else who's next on the list in Eugene, Oregon. So it's a story that encompasses any number of police jurisdictions. And although Allie, it's an Allie Reynolds book, and although she's not in actual danger, she's not the character who is in jeopardy. She is the one acting as the puppet master behind the curtain, drawing all of these jurisdictions together and turning them on the right road. It's also a picture of, you know, these days in the media, we only hear about cops if they're bad cops and they do something wrong or if they're dead cops because somebody shot them.

We don't hear about the cops who do their job every day, who are haunted by the cases they don't solve. We don't see that. And this is a collection. At one point, one of the characters said, it took a whole village to solve this crime. And it's a village of cops in several different jurisdictions. And they emerge as real people. You see them, you see what motivated them to become police officers in the first place. You see what affects them as they go down the road.

I think any law enforcement officer who reads this book would find that I try to do justice to them. Awesome. And there's lots of great police officers in the world, and it's like you described. would find that I try to do justice to them. Awesome. And there's lots of great police officers in the world, and it's like you described. So anything else we can tease out about the book to get people to pick it up? Is there any cliffhangers or anything? I know we can't give away the ending, of course,

and usually the middle. But anything more you want to tease out on the book? I spent five years as a K-12 librarian on the Tohono O'odham Reservation west of Tucson. And I learned and told many of the

Tohono O'odham's stories and legends. But in the storytelling tradition of the desert people, that's what to Hana Adam means, desert people. I learned that a story must end where it begins and readers will find that's true in collateral damage. The book ends where it began, but if the

end of that book doesn't give you goosebumps, I'll be surprised. When I was editing that book, when I got to the last page I had goosebumps and actually thinking about that last page right now I have goosebumps on my legs wow is that enough of a cliffhanger that says something especially when you you know you've read it a million times editing it and stuff that's definitely a cliffhanger i think people are going to love this have you ever thought about taking like all your character you know marvel studios you know in those movies from marvel they take all the superheroes they put them in one movie you ever thought about taking all your different

characters from the different ellie ellie ended up belonging to simon and sch, all of the other characters belong to Harper Collins. And so in the book that's coming, actually, here's something that's interesting. After spending a whole year writing Collateral Damage, when I finished writing that book, I had this little seed of an idea that had been sitting in the back of my head all during that year. And in our family, our mother, Evie Busk, decreed that you had to eat everything on your, you had to eat a little bit of everything, everything on your plate. And if you didn't clean your plate, no dessert. And so my literary version of cleaning my plate is I'm not allowed to look at the next book until I finished cleaning my plate of the one I'm working on. So I was focused on collateral damage. And I think it's a pretty good

book. But in the meantime, this idea was sitting back there. And when I finally started writing that, again, with the help of my literary engineer, because I couldn't find a title. And when he gave me the title, Blessing of of the lost girls i started writing the book the next day and i wrote it beginning to end in two months flat wow now is that the beaumont book or which book is that series in that it's book number six in the walker family series okay you do the walkers okay so that one is due and is written and due out in September. There you go. There you go. Well, you've always got exciting stuff going for you.

I just can't wait to get 70 books the way you're going here, probably next year. Well, I'm still in the game. When I was struggling with collateral damage, I thought maybe I've lost my mojo. Maybe I just can't do this anymore. And then I wrote blessing and I said, no, I haven't. I haven't lost it. Well, good for you. Good for you. Well, it's wonderful to have you on the show. Anything more you want to tease on out before we go? doing the big

three-week Pack Your Suitcase and Go On Forever book tour. Those days are pretty much over. Next week, I will be going back to Arizona to do the grand opening

of Collateral Damage, but I'm also going to Left Coast Crime. They are giving me a Lifetime Achievement Award. And I guess that's only fair. I started writing in 1982. So J.P. Beaumont and I have been together as author and character for more than 40 years now. Well, congratulations. So I guess it's only fair that they give me a Lifetime Achievement Award. I went to the first left-coast crime in San Francisco, and I was obviously much younger than him.

I'm sure I was wearing no-nonsense pantyhose and high heels for that. I'm 78. I will be wearing my sketchers well i still wear the no nonsense you don't want to see me in in high heels they should have come to see me a long time ago there you go well there you go i mean you've been writing since 1968 right no no 19 i sat down to write my first book in March of 1982. Okay. There you go.

Well, it's a wonderful ride, and I'm glad to always have you back on the show. Please come for the next book. It's always a joy to have you here. The first book I wrote was never published by anybody. It is, for one thing, it was 1400 pages long. But in my blog, a week ago, I wrote a blog called Sometimes No is the Right Answer, because people were asking me, well well why don't you just get that book out and write it again so people can go to my website jajance slash jajance.com slash blog and read sometimes no is the right answer and you'll see why i have never published that book and never will never will

okay well they say never say never it might be maybe you know your fans would like it no this there is a legitimate reason for not publishing that book and people people can read about it in the blog there you go well you can't give people everything you got to hold back something and and make them you know they work for it they got to make them work for it there you go i love the concept well thank you very much Mrs. Jantz for coming on the show Any other dot coms you want to plug Before we go out Actually

They'll be on On March 14th They'll be FaceTiming Live my An interview from Poison Pen For that initial

Signing for Collateral damage so people might want to Tune into that There you go well we certainly appreciate Coming on thank you very much Thank you and thank Colt Colt is the one who got Thanks to Colt for getting the streamer running

Yeah good job man Good job well thank you very much Mrs. Jantz who got my Thanks to Colt for getting the streamer running. Yeah. Good job, man. Good job. Well, thank you very much, Mrs. Jantz, for coming on. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss, all the places the show is on the air. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay

safe, and we'll see you guys next time. Thank Chris. Thank you so much.