The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Den of Iniquity: A J. P. Beaumont Novel (J. P. Beaumont Novel, 23) by J. A Jance

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

Den of Iniquity: A J. P. Beaumont Novel (J. P. Beaumont Novel, 23) by J. A Jance https://amzn.to/3ToRNqS New York Times bestselling author J. A. Jance returns with a new pulse-pounding suspense novel featuring beloved private investigator J. P. Beaumont as his investigation of a seemingly accidental death uncovers a complex web of evil. Former Seattle homicide cop J. P. Beaumont faces trouble in the small town of Ashland, as both his personal and professional lives are thrown into turmoil. Beau’s daughter and son-in-law are having marital troubles, and his grandson, a senior in high school, shows up on his doorstep, wanting to live with Beau and his wife Mel as he finishes out the school year. Meanwhile, a friend from his past asks for Beau’s help in looking into what appears to be an accidental death. A young man died of a fentanyl overdose, but those closest to him are convinced that he would never have used the drug, and that something much more sinister has happened. Beau agrees to unofficially reopen the case, and his investigation leads him to uncover similar mysterious deaths that all point to a most unlikely suspect. As the case becomes more complicated than he could have imagined, and past and present mysteries collide, it will take everything Beau has to track down a dangerous vigilante killer. The result is an unforgettable read, and “newcomers and longtime series fans alike will be thrilled” (Publishers Weekly).About the author J.A. Jance is the New York Times best selling author of 46 contemporary mysteries in four different series. A voracious reader, J. A. Jance knew she wanted to be a writer from the moment she read her first Wizard of Oz book in second grade. Always drawn to mysteries, from Nancy Drew right through John D. McDonald's Travis Magee series, it was only natural that when she tried her hand at writing her first book, it would be a mystery as well. J. A. Jance went on to become the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family, and Edge of Evil. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona. Jance is an avid crusader for many causes, including the American Cancer Society, Gilda's Club, the Humane Society, the YMCA, and the Girl Scouts. A lover of animals, she has a rescued Dachshund named Bella.

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. 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 roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys. For 16 years and over 2,000 episodes, we bring you the most amazing authors and minds on the show the most brilliant people that share with you

their stories of fiction and non-fiction that help improve the quality of your life entertain you and give you insights stories are the owner's manual to life is like we like we always say probably the reigning champion or the returning guest on the show at this point is a young lady called j.a jance she's an amazing prolific author she's been on the show at this point is a young lady called J.A. Jantz. She's an amazing, prolific author. She's been on the show more times than I can count. I think she is the reigning queen of the most guest appearances on The Chris Foss Show. Great to be here.

We're honored to have her as well, always. It's always a joy to see her and hang out with her. Her newest book is out called Den of Iniquity a jp beaumont novel it's number 23 and it's out september 10th 2024 we'll be talking to jay jance about her books and everything that goes into them she is the new york times best-selling author of contemporary mysteries in four different series she's a voracious reader and she wanted to be a writer from the moment she read her first Wizard of Oz book in second grade.

Always drawn to mysteries from Nancy Drew right down to John D. McDonald's Travis McGee series. It was only natural that she tried her hand at writing her first book. It would be a mystery as well. She wanted to become a New York bestselling author, New York Times bestselling author

of the J.P. Beaumont series, joanna brady series three interrelated thrillers including the walker family and the edge of evil i think she wrote the edge of evil about me and my life story no i'm just kidding it's not about the my life story maybe it should be i don't know i'll have to read the book and find out born in south dakota and brought up in bisbee arizona jance lives with her husband is in seattle was, and Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to the show. Ms. Jance, how are you? I'm well, I'm medium because I've got a summer cold that came on yesterday.

Oh, no. But for the most part, I'm just fine. Thank you very much. When we're on and have you again. I always enjoy having you on the show, by the way. We have these great discussions. Sometimes you tell me some great stories out there that are quite quite exceptional so i always enjoy having you on thank you for coming back yeah give us a dot com where people can find you on the interwebs

and look at your website i'm jajansauthor.com that's my that's my website miss chance tell us about this latest book give us a 30,000 overview of your new book this was a really fun book to write because i write series jp beaumont and i started together on this fictional journey more than 40 years ago in 1983. And he's aged over time along with me. I gave him my birthday. So I can remember how old he is. So we've traveled and he's aged and he's changed and his circumstances are changed.

When I met him, he was a single, a divorced homicide cop, middle-aged homicide cop in Seattle, estranged with a serious drinking problem, estranged from his family. And now his life has turned around. He's retired from being a sworn police officer. And his family members have grown up around him. So this book starts with him out for a walk with his new dog on Valentine's Day. It's cold and sort of wet in Bellingham, Washington. But he's out walking anyway, because now that he has a dog, he sort of has to walk. And he comes back to his house. And there's a strange card in the yard.

Oh. And then the door opens, and this long drink of water steps out, who happens to be his grandson, Kyle. And Kyle is 18 years old. He has just run away from home because his father has a pregnant girlfriend that he has moved into the house. His parents are getting a divorce, and he wants to come live with grandpa and grandma. Well, there you go. So it's on for a new adventure. So part of this book is Bo and his wife, Mel, negotiating the generation chasm, not the generation gap, but the chasm between their 70-something lives and their teenage grandson's life. And that was really fun to write there is of course a mystery and it is a serial killer oh does end up tracking him her down i'm not going to say which it is murder she murder you say so is this maybe a new character?

This son, is he a new character maybe that's going to be in the future books? Or can you divulge that information? Kyle? Yeah. The grandson? Yeah. Beats me. I never know what's going to be in a book until I start to write it.

Really? When I start to write it, I never know how it's going to end because I don't outline. I don't outline my books, nor do I outline my series. Sounds like my life choices. I am what they called a seat of the panther writer. Ah, once again, sounds like my life and life choices. I make the same choices sometimes, and my life shows it. So what were some of your motivations in this new book?

What kind of lit your fire at like, here's what I want to write about in this version of the Beaumont series? We all see the numbers. Fentanyl overdoses. I think there were like 1,800 of them in King County in 2018. Very real. There are four times that.

Of course, what we see on the news is just a statistic. We don't see a name. And in this book, we see a grandmother who says, no, no, no, wait a minute. My grandson was clean.

He was not on drugs. He did not overdose. I think he was murdered. And she calls Bo for help. But in the process of him solving this mystery, he ends up getting behind the statistics and learning about the people who have died and learning about the people who are left behind. Kind of economic chaos and the kind of familial chaos that those deaths leave. They're not just a statistic. They're not just a number in the newspaper.

They're real people. In the process of writing this book, I think I changed my mind about those statistics as well. Yeah. I had friends. I mean, this was in the 2000s, very early on, before people were really getting aware of what was going on. But I had friends that, I had one friend, her sister had been in a car accident, and she had to have the head cage and stuff you know the the wiring they put on her head and so she was she was really you know barely survived this car crash and at the time she was you know a normal person she got hooked on on the on the opioids

and couldn't get off and you know took a long time to recover when you're you know that you're you've been through that much damage and by the time she got out she was highly addicted to these opioids and she eventually ended up working the streets for heroin you know once they wouldn't give her anymore and she died eventually of a heroin overdose it was very unfortunate and this is back before you know what I remember hearing about it, I was like, holy crap, somebody should do something about this. This seems inappropriate. What I could do about it, write a story about it. And I believe in the process, I think people, they're fictional characters, but I think my readers will come to care about those characters in a way that

may surprise them i certainly came to care about them in the process of writing about them these are unfortunate human beings too right i mean they you know some people make bad choices some people in this case you know i i've had i've had i have one family member in a care center who's on a fentanyl patch because she has MS and extreme pain. And the fentanyl, it's not the best thing for you, but it's effective at pain. But it's basically just glorified heroin. It's crazy. It's also deadly. Yeah, very much.

So you write about this. It sounds like you did some study on it you do you looked into some of the stats and the data and and all that stuff so you could write well about it then i i did and i did an interesting thing bo looks at this problem and he says i'm not going to be able to solve this problem and because he he needs to talk to all of these people and find out their background. But it turns out that somebody, a forensic economist, is doing a study, and she has interviewed all those families. And he's able to go to her interviews and find out which of those cases need to be further investigated.

So maybe some dirty play here, some dirty business going on. The forensic economist, as I was getting ready to write about her, I needed a name. It's always a problem to name people. And so I decided to name her Yolanda Aguirre. Yolanda Aguirre was a girl in my high school homeroom class. She was Aguirre. She was over by the window. I was Busk. I was over in the wall by the blackboards. And that's a long time ago. So we didn't really know one another very well in high school, but I knew that she had become a fan, and I thought, why don't I name this character Yolanda Aguirre?

So I sent her a note and said, I'd like to name a character after you, would you mind? Wow. And then I didn't hear anything. i went ahead and i i was writing the book and i thought okay if i have to i can change it and then a few months later i heard back from her daughter she had passed away suddenly oh no and so she isolanda Aguirre in this book, and the book is dedicated to her. Wow, that is awesome. And a wonderful memory for this person and stuff.

You have a great memory for memory, so I can't remember anything from high school and stuff. I am plagued with an excellent memory. Tell us a little bit, familiarize the audience that maybe don't know you, the five people or something that don't. Familiarize them with your, how many books you've written now? You've got quite a few. I know you've got a couple that are in the. I believe the one I just finished, the next Joanna Brady book is number 68. So it's close to 70 books.

Wow. A period of 40, 41 years. And I've been writing at a rate of 1.5 books a year for all this time. Congratulations. Not bad for a girl. I mean, women write a lot of great novels and books, and we have them on the show. But yeah, I mean, i suppose it's not bad for a girl i guess i mean you're brilliant in it and you do extremely well with it and you you have so

many of these great series that are running we got into why you did this you know some of your story if you want to familiarize people a little bit more with your original origin story i always tell it to people you know originally you wanted to write and, you know, you came from an era where you couldn't write. It was kind of frowned upon. It was not approved. Approved, there we go. I wasn't allowed in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona in 1964. Isn't that amazing?

As the professor told me, you're a girl. Girls become teachers or nurses. Boys become writers. But, and my first husband told me when we married in 1968, he was allowed in the creative writing program that was closed to me. Wow. So in 1968, he told me there's only going to be one writer in our family, and I'm it.

So I didn't start writing until 13 years later after I divorced him. And by the time my first book was published, both my first husband and the creative writing professor were dead. I trust that every time I... You shouldn't laugh about that. ...in their respective graves.

The one thing I remember about you is you never say anything bad about Miss Jantz. Otherwise, you might end up killed in her books. You might end up on the wrong side of her. The creative writing professor is the place killer in The Hunter, the first Walker family book. So do not make me mad. Making Mr. Writers mad is a bad idea. That's true.

That's true. But I don't know. It might be one way to get in your book. Maybe I'll make your coffee runk sometime or something. Someone told me something interesting recently about my books that i hadn't noticed yeah and he said in every single book of yours even though they are murder mysteries at some point in the story, there's a moment of reconciliation. And I never realized it before, but he's right.

There's a moment of reconciliation in Den of Iniquity. There's a moment of reconciliation in Overkill, the next Ellie Reynolds book. And the same happens in By Reason of Insanity, the book I finished writing last night. And I just, I never realized it until that reader pointed it out. I'd like to piss you off enough to make you write about me in one of your books and make me famous, but not enough that you would about me in one of your books and make me famous, but not enough that you would hate me and never appear on the show again.

So somehow I have to find a middle ground there, but I'm just kidding. But I always joke with novels about that because I'm like, if anybody angers you in life, do you write about them like Mrs. Janstons? Because I know it's a bad way to get on her bad side. Don't get on my bad side. Don't get on my bad side. Don't get on your bad side. I imagine your publisher walks that fine line too as well and makes sure they don't.

Whatever Mrs. Janz wants, let her. William Morrow is just sitting around going, yeah, just whatever she wants to do, just let her do it. Now you've got two other books, I think you said, that are in the can or possibly almost in the can for a future publication. Yes. Overkill is the next Allie Reynolds book. It's due out in April. And the copy editing on that is going to arrive any minute.

So I needed to have, by reason of insanity, out of my head so I could concentrate on that, that the copy editing is going to arrive in the next day or so, and then I'll have to re-immerse myself in that book. While at the same time, I'm talking about Dan and the Nick. Good luck. Good luck with that. Oh, that's just so funny. That's just, you got a lot going on with all your books. Now, you want to tell us what the other two books are in the can,

or can you disclose that yet? Overkill is Allie Reynolds. She's at work. The phone rings. And it's her husband's first wife calling from jail because her husband is dead and they think she did it oh now does she know her husband was dead until this call or can you disclose that i guess how did she find out he was dead she woke up covered with blood and he was dead in the bed

next to her so they sort of think she did it okay there you go of course ally is someone who can't mind her own business and so naturally she gets involved in this case and in the upcoming joanna brady book they find a dead kid in a duffel bag floating under a flooded bridge. There's been a flash flood on the San Pedro River, and so they're pulling out the debris to keep the bridge from collapsing, and part of the debris is a duffel bag with a dead child in it. And this is in Joanna's Cochise County.

But the investigation into that case leads to a serial killer who has lived in Bisbee as a well-respected member of the community for decades while going out hunting and being a serial killer during the summers. Wow.

A lot going on there. That was an interesting book to write. So what else is in the future for you? What else are you going to be up to? I'm still getting my steps. Still get 10,000 steps every day.

Every day. Let me check the phone. Let's see. I need to keep up with you. I have been, I have walked a minimum of 10,000 steps. Wow. For 1,016 days. Wow. Oh.,016 days. Wow.

Oh. That adds up to 27,478,000 steps. Holy crap. I am not doing 10,000, let alone probably 1,000 steps a day. I don't know. I'd have to check on my thing. But yeah, I definitely need to work harder keeping up with you. Walking gives me time to think.

And particularly, I finally figured out a way to not have to count steps in my head as I'm walking. And so in this book, in the book I just finished reading, I could create scenes and conversation while I was walking. I used to just be stuck counting the steps, which is sort of pointless. What keeps you going? What keeps you writing? What keeps you coming up with storylines and compiling them i mean i i know i know you got started late but have you ever just thought about just you know enjoying the i don't know traveling and sitting in the sun enjoying retirement i write i write the books my husband writes the checks and

i motivate keep up with writing because he can write checks faster than i can write that sounds like some relationships i've had the but i'm the one usually writing the checks or maybe wait no i can have that different anyway so it's very fun i'm glad you're loving it and you're just writing and writing and writing and you guys have you have such a huge fan base of people that love your books do they have any sort of idea how big your fan base is in numbers by chance no i really spread out probably across a lot of books and genres right a weekly blog and i i love the interactions on the blog because people comment on the blog and I can it's the blog is sort of a window in my life for that week and it allows me to stay in touch with my my fans during the course during the pandemic

when everything was shut down that fan interaction was a real lifeline for me. And so the blog is important to me because it allows me to stay in touch with my collection of readers. Ms. Chance, anything more you want to pitch out on the new book, Den of Iniquity, before we go? The chasm between Kyle and Beaumont is funny it's going to be a kind of a humorous murder mystery kyle says how about if we watch a movie how about the martian and beau says okay but he's thinking it's going to be Little Green Men, and it turns out to be a really good movie.

And of course, Kyle is a kid who doesn't know anything about stick shifts. And so he says he's really impressed that Bo's neighbor has a Shelby. And Bo looks at him and says, how do you know about Shelbys? And he said, haven't you seen Ford versus Ferrari? And of course, Bo hadn't seen that one either. Those little bi-plays were really fun to write. Has those been in your other books, or is that something new that you're incorporating, or just in this series?

No, I think they're incorporated all the way along. Ms. Jantz, it's been wonderful to have you on. Give us your dot-coms where people can find you on the internet and the final pitch out for people to pick up your book. Jance, author.com. Really hard to remember. Miss Jance, it's been wonderful to have you on. We always love having you and it's always wonderful to talk to you and see you and keep up the good work. We'll look forward to the next book in whichever one of your series is up next that they're putting out on the marketplace.

Thank you very much. Allie Reynolds is coming. Allie Reynolds is coming for all the fans that love that series thanks to my audience for tuning in order of the book wherever fine books are sold it's out september 24th september 10th actually den of iniquity a jp beaumont beaumont let me recut that. Den of Iniquity, a J.P. Beaumont novel. It's novel number 23, out by J.A. Chance. Pick it up wherever fine books are sold. Pre-order it now. And all that good stuff. Go to goodreads.com,

4chatschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chatschristmas, chrismas1, the TikTok, and all those crazy places on the internet. We'll see you guys next time.