The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Missing and Endangered: A Brady Novel of Suspense by J. A Jance

Episode Date: March 6, 2021

Missing and Endangered: A Brady Novel of Suspense by J. A Jance NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady’s professional and personal lives collide when her college-age daughter is involved in a missing persons case in this evocative and atmospheric mystery in J. A. Jance’s New York Times bestselling suspense series, set in the beautiful desert country of the American Southwest. When Jennifer Brady returns to Northern Arizona University for her sophomore year, she quickly becomes a big sister to her new roommate, Beth Rankin, a brilliant yet sheltered sixteen-year-old freshman. For a homeschooled Beth, college is her first taste of both freedom and unfettered access to the internet, and Jenny is concerned that she’s too naïve and rebellious for her own good. Her worries are well-founded because one day Beth vanishes, prompting Jenny to alert campus authorities, local police, and her mom, Sheriff Joanna Brady—who calls in a favor. Beth is found, but Jenny’s concern has unwittingly put her in the crosshairs of a criminal bent on revenge. With Christmas vacation approaching, and Beth at war with her parents, Jenny invites Beth to the shelter of the Brady home. While Joanna is sympathetic, she’s caught up in a sensitive case—an officer-involved shooting that has placed the lives of two young children in jeopardy—leaving her stretched thin to help a fragile young woman recently gone missing and endangered. About J. A. Jance J.A. Jance is the top 10 New York Times bestselling author of the Joanna Brady series; the J. P. Beaumont series; three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family; and Edge of Evil, the first in a series featuring Ali Reynolds. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.

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. 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 roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with the most amazing podcast as well be sure to go back and listen to all 700 podcasts that we have. You can listen to some of the most greatest guests that we have there going over the last

several years. Go back and check them out. Hey, you're stuck in quarantine. You got nothing better to do. If you want to see the video version and the amazing guests we have on today, she's the author of 60 plus books. I'll let her to find that here in a second. And oh my gosh, you can go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification to see all the notifications of everything that we do there. You can see her and me at goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. And of course, you'll find her by her name. We'll get to that in a second. And also you can see all the different groups that we have on Facebook, on LinkedIn, and the multiple accounts on Instagram as well. So watch for that show on there.

Today, we have the most amazing, I would say epic, prolific, just a stunning author of just so many books. And you're going to get a chance to meet her in a second. Her name is J.A. Jantz. Her new book is called Missing and Endangered. J.A. Jantz is the top 10 New York Times bestselling author of the Joanna Brady series, the J.P. Beaumont series, three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family, Edge of Evil, the first in a series featuring Allie Reynolds. She was born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona. Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington and Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to the show, J.A. Jance. How are you? Thank you. I'm just fine and I'm happy to be here. It's an honor to have you on the show. Give us your plugs and your dot coms where people can order up your stuff on the interwebs, get to know you better. My website is jajance.com. I have a blog that posts every Friday morning and is a window on my life. It's what has surfaced in my life in that particular week. So it's sort of like reading my autobiography

in weekly installments. But because so much of my life has to do with writing, writing is my life, a lot of times the blog has to do with writing too. Progress on any given book, when I've stopped dead on any given book, when I'm doing a book tour as as I am right now, a virtual book tour without luggage and airplane travel, but it's a book tour nonetheless. How are you faring with this type of book tour as compared to the luggage book tour? The truth is, I really love being on tour. I love having the opportunity to speak in front of a live audience where you can actually see if people are falling asleep or not. with my fans this this weekend i would have been in tucson for the tucson festival of books and the blog this week is about my my co one of my co-panelists this week i met years ago i met joe kenda of homicide hunter fame and he and i are doing a panel called Homicide Fact and Fiction,

which should be fun. But on my blog, there are links to that, so people who are interested can click on the links and attend. I thought this was pretty cool. How many books exactly have you written? And I think we talked pre-show about this. It's really neat you answer all the emails from your fans and interact with them yes i do when people write to me i i respond i don't have a group of trolls out under a bridge sorting out the the good emails from the bad emails. And I confess the cranky emails go to the bottom of the pile and I respond to them last.

But readers are important to me. Readers' opinions are important to me. And that's one of the kinds of interactions I get both from emails but also from interaction with people in public. The amount of books that you've written is just extraordinary and prolific. I'm still trying to write my first one, so I'm way behind you and no chance of ever catching up. But do you want to tell the story of when you started writing and what motivated you and some of the history? I was born in South Dakota. I grew up in Bisbee, Arizona, and we moved to Bisbee in the late 40s.

It was still a booming copper mining town. And in fact, my blazer is Bisbee blue. Bisbee blue is a strain of turquoise. And when the underground miners would find a vein of that, somehow or other, that vein got chipped out and went back up the shafts in people's lunch buckets. That was called high grading. But when I'm doing a Joanna Brady book those those are set in Cochise County in and around Bisbee and so for for an event like this of course I have to wear my Bisbee blue blazer but I grew up in Bisbee I wanted to become a writer from the time I met the Wizard of Oz in second grade. My second grade teacher had books over under the window.

And if you finished your work early, you could go get one of those books and take it back to your desk. And it was among Mrs. Spangler's books that I encountered Frank Baum's work. And I wasn't so much enchanted by the wizard as I was by the idea that there was a person standing behind the pages. The wizard was behind his curtain. But Frank Baum was the guy behind the pages.

He was the guy putting the words on the pages. And that was who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. There were a few bumps in the road at the University of Arizona in 1964. I wasn't allowed in the creative writing program because, as the professor told me, you're a girl. Which actually was true. I was a girl. At age 20, that was very disappointing. But so I got a teaching degree and later a degree in library science. I spent five years teaching on the Tohono O'odham west of Tucson. But I still wanted to write. I married a guy who was allowed in the creative writing program that was

closed to me. He got a good grade in the creative writing class. He never published anything. But after we married in 1968, he told me there's only going to be one writer in our family, and I'm it. I'm going to be married. So I put my writing ambitions on hold. And other than writing poetry in the dark of night, I didn't do anything about being a writer for the next dozen years. The thing about my husband is he imitated Faulkner and Hemingway by drinking too much and writing too little. And he died of chronic alcoholism at age 42, a year and a half after I divorced him. But after I divorced him, I didn't divorce him because I stopped loving him. I divorced him because in the previous 10 years, he had been hospitalized nine times for chronic alcoholism. And when he showed up at my son's T-ball game at five o'clock in the afternoon,

so drunk that when the game was over, he crawled on his hands and knees from the bleachers back to the car. That was when I realized I had to get out to save my kids and save myself. So I got a divorce. I moved to Seattle. I started, I had a job in the insurance industry and I went to, I went to a Dale Carnegie course and told a story about an encounter my first husband and I had in 1970 with a killer, a serial killer. Someone said, somebody should write a book about that. And so I thought, I'm divorced. What have I got to lose?

So in the middle of March of 1981, I sat down to write my first book. Nobody ever bought that book. It was way too long. In 1982, I started working on the first Detective Beaumont book, which became my first published novel in 1985. And Beaumont, Beaumont is my literary firstborn. He, I met him on a train, actually. I had sent my kids to spring break. I had tried to write this book for months and it wouldn't go anywhere. And I, the kids were at camp and I thought I'm going to go to Portland. I'm going to visit somebody in the life insurance business. But I took along a stack of notebooks and a fistful of pens.

And as the train pulled out of the King street station, I thought, what would happen if I wrote this book through the detective's point of view? And I wrote, I got out a pen and paper and I started writing. She might have been a cute kid once. That was hard to tell now. She was dead. And as soon as I wrote those words, I was in J.P. Beaumont's body. I was walking around the crime scene in his shoes. I was seeing it through his eyes. I was hearing what people, what he heard, what people said to him, what he said to other people.

But I was also hearing what was going on in his head. And Beaumont and I have been author and character for almost 40 years now. I was just going to say 40 years. Wow. I could never be Sue Grafton ever. The idea of sitting down and writing 26 books in a row about the same character. I, I have limited attention span. After about nine Beaumont books, I was tired of him. I threatened to knock him off. And my editor said,

why don't you redo that first book that nobody ever bought? That first book was thinly fictionalized true crime. And the killer from that 1970 case in Tucson was still in prison. My husband had been a witness in that case. And I didn't want to write a book that would draw that guy's attention to me. I had a contract to write a book. I had a paycheck to write a book. I had a deadline to write a book. And I didn't have a bad guy. And so that created an exceptionally serious case of writer's block. I was so desperate that when my University of Arizona alumni magazine came that year, I read the whole thing from cover to cover. And at the back, just in front of the obituaries, was this article about the newly reconstituted creative writing program at the U of A. And my husband said, well, you've got all these books up. Why don't you offer to be writer in residence for a semester in the sun so I called

him up I sold life insurance for 10 years I'm not afraid of making a cold call got the director on the phone told him who I was and what I did didn't he want me to come be writer in residence and he said and this is a direct quote oh we don't do anything with genre fiction here we only do literary fiction it was a miracle i was healed of writer's block on the spot and the crazed killer in hour of the hunter turned out to be a former professor of creative writing from the University of Arizona. A little bit of writerly revenge goes a long way. And that turned out to be my first Walker family book, Hour of the Hunter. By the way, the main character in that book is a woman who's a teacher on the reservation, but she really wants to be a writer.

Like me, she had a husband who was allowed in the creative writing program that was closed to her. He's dead at the beginning of the book. So here is an important bit of information. If you happen to have friends who want to become mystery writers, do not make them mad because we have our ways of getting even so when i went back to writing beaumont after after hour of the hunter it was fun again and then my editor said why don't you come up with a different character and you can go back and forth between them so when I started writing Beaumont Beaumont is was a middle-aged male homicide cop I wasn't a male I had never been in law enforcement Beau is a Seattle native I had lived in Seattle for less than a year. So I had to do a lot of research to get all that stuff. And in addition, the Beaumont books are written in the first person.

So I thought, okay, why don't I press the easy button here? If I'm going to write a new series, why don't I have, why don't I have a female protagonist? Why don't I write it in third person? And why don't I set it someplace I know? So that's where Joanna Brady came from and how she ended up in Cochise County. Eventually I got, so for years I did Beaumont Brady

with the occasional walker. And finally I was tired of all of them. And that's when Allie Reynolds came along. I didn't want to write about anybody. And my editor said, write something new. Just have it here by the 1st of January. She said that in May, writing a book between May and January, I could do that. So I signed the contract they gave me a paycheck I had a deadline had no idea who was going to be

in that book that was May June and July passed August and September passed suddenly it was October and I still didn't know who was going to be in that book that was due in New York in January. I had writer's block. And what I do when I have writer's block is I compulsively watch the news. We were in Tucson, and one day on a Thursday in October, I watched the noon news, and my favorite newscaster, Patty Weiss, was the anchor. Patty went to work in Tucson Television News while she was still a student at the University of Arizona.

By then, she was in her early 50s. So I watched the noon news. Five o'clock in the afternoon came. I still had writer's block. I turned on the afternoon news and Patty Wise was nowhere to be seen. They didn't say she was on assignment. They didn't say she was on vacation. She had just vanished over the weekend the other news outlets in town let people know that between the noon news and the five o'clock news patty's new 30 something news director came to her told her she was too old to be on TV, and escorted her from the building. I already told you it's a bad idea to make mystery writers mad.

Within minutes, I was writing about someone named Allie Reynolds being yanked off her news anchor desk in L.A. for exactly the same reason. So there are, I'm working on, so I alternate. There are now, let's see, 24 Beaumont books. I'm working on number 25. Missing and Endangered is Joanna Brady number 19. And there are 17 Alley books and five Walker books. I am fully employed i almost want to make you upset just so maybe you'll write a murder mystery about a podcaster

well you haven't made me mad mad yet i would never want to don't make me mad i would never want to but it's tempting because i i get a book so why don't i i write about the books in series in a row i don't i don't write more than one book at a time i'm usually writing one book editing another and promoting a third so there are three balls in the air but i'm not creating more than one story at a time because that would drive me nuts. But so I alternate and the last, the last published book last year was credible threat. And that was Allie Reynolds. And so this year it's Joanna Brady's turn.

And Joanna Brady is the, is the, is the thing in the new book, missing in danger. I have two questions for you, if you don't mind me asking before we get to that. I think if I recall on one of the research videos that I watched of yours, you were, you're secretly writing a little bit during your first marriage? And he would be passed out by 6.30, 7 o'clock at night. We were teaching on the reservation. We were living 30 miles from town in either direction, two miles off the highway, seven miles to the nearest neighbor and or telephone. So I wasn't supposed to be writing, but the thing about writers is they write anyway. And so once he was dead to the world in his recliner, I sat at the dining room table and started jotting off little pieces of poetry. At the time I was writing them, I thought I was being true to my art.

And I wrote about what I was feeling, what was going on in our lives. And I wrote those poems for a period of almost two decades. In 1982, a year and a half after I divorced my husband, he went into DTs, was hospitalized, and eventually died. But when I wrote the poetry, I didn't show it to him. I wrote it, and I stuck it in the strongbox and get out all of the documents you have to present when someone dies marriage certificates birth certificates all of that and in that strongbox were all those little pieces of poetry and when I read through them I realized I wasn't being true to my art. I was using words to deal with the central issues of my life. And those poems were eventually published in a book called After the Fire.

It's my autobiography in poetry and prose. But it's the story of the journey of that first marriage. And in reading those poems, you can see the utter loneliness of living in an addictive household. I thought I was the only one who had ever fallen for all those stupid promises. And when people read After the Fire, they tell me that reading that story, my story, made them feel less alone. So After the Fire is available available it's still in print but the title poem goes like this i have touched the fire it burned me but i knew what my lived it seared me but it made me whole. He called me. I went gladly, though I saw the rocks, fell laughing

through the singeing air. I have known the fire. I'll live with nothing rather than with less. The flame is out. There's nothing left but ash. But if you read After the Fire as someone who has read my books, you'll also see the origins of many of my storylines and many of my characters. When I started writing about Beaumont, I had him do, when he wasn't working, he did the same thing I had lived with for 18 years. Pretty soon, readers pointed out to me that J.P. Beaumont had a problem, and he needed to sober up. And he goes into treatment in book number eight, and so he's been sober for a lot longer than he was drinking. Some people tell me they liked him better when he was a drunk. I worry but that sobriety is in the background of his life and his character and in the joanna brady books that you you meet joanna brady's mother she

her mother eleanor is a piece of work and And you can see in some of the poetry that I had the same kind of conflict with my own mother. The problem was my mother had a seventh grade education. She had raised seven kids. And I was the first person in my family to go off to college. And so I came home with my degree and I thought I was incredibly smart. And that was where I was when I was writing that poetry. I thought my mother had wasted her life being a housewife and mother.

Then I had kids and suddenly my mother got a whole lot smarter. I think we all go through that. But a lot of my characters are hidden in the background of the book of poetry. So yes, I was a secret writer, even though I was not writing for public consumption at that time. Did you feel really, because I'm really curious about the story. I like stories like this. Did you really feel torn?

Did you feel like you were hiding something? You just felt like you weren't living your true self? Or did you find that afterwards that you, in recollection, where you're like, I'm not living my heart, as you mentioned? putting my belief in my husband ahead of my belief in myself. And it wasn't until I decided to take control of my own life that I was able to become the person I am today. I'm always interested when people tell me that someday when their lives are perfect, they're going to be writers. And that always makes me laugh because real writers write when their lives are imperfect. When I started writing my first novels in the 80s, I was a single parent, no child support, two little kids, a full-time job selling life insurance. And the only time I had to write was between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m. before I got the kids

up to go to school and got me up to go to work, dressed to go to work. But those hours of the day, I never had to set my alarm. My eyes popped open at 4 o'clock in the morning. I turned on my computer. I bought my first computer in 1983. It was a dual floppy eagle with 128K of memory. If I wrote a chapter that was longer than 20, 2,500 words, the cursor would freeze up, but the guy who sold it to me fixed it.

So that every morning when I turned on my computer, the first words I saw were these, a writer is someone who has written today. That's brilliant. I love that. I love these stories uh the great thing about having the novelists on the chris faust show is i love how they take their own life their own experience and we have to go through these these these tragedies or challenges of life and those get poured into the stories and that's what makes the stories great sometimes the thing that with Bo's drinking for instance that was entirely invisible to me it was four books into the series that my reader started pointing out that Bo had a drinking problem I said really

these are books are you kidding but eventually they got my attention and I could see they were right and as I said earlier I do listen to my readers but yes you take I think it's like being a pointillist painter. You take these little bits and pieces and you put those in the books. They're not, they're not some great overwhelming event necessarily. I, in Joanna Brady's case, when I started to create Joanna, I knew, I knew she lived in Bisbee, Arizona. Her husband was a deputy sheriff. He was running for office.

And in the first scene in Desert Heat, the first Joanna Brady book, Joanna is there with her mother and her daughter Jenny and they're waiting it's the it's the evening of Joanna's 10th wedding anniversary and they're waiting for her husband to come home so they can go out and have dinner and Joanna's mother Eleanor is there to babysit Jenny. So Jenny is this bright little kid and they've just had sex education at Greenway School and she has counted on her fingers and figured out that there aren't quite enough months between the wedding anniversary and her birthday. And so she says to her mother, Mom, was I a preemie? Of course, she wasn't a preemie.

The wedding was what was late. But it was like she exploded a bomb in the middle of the living room because, yes, the wedding was late. And Eleanor Lathrop has been on a tear for the past decade because her 17-year they gave up for adoption long before they married and had Joanna. So did I know that when I wrote that first scene? No, I did not. But yet the thread from that initial conversation has been all the way through the Joanna Brady books ever since. Wow.

At the beginning of the series, Jenny was nine. In Missing and Endangered, she it turns out, very brave young woman. And it's been interesting to see her grow over the years. Because I've never been a cop, a lot of the research I do comes from watching crime TV. On TV, I became friends with Joe Kenda because I'm addicted to crime TV. But in those shows, you're often allowed to watch interviews, detective suspect interviews. You can see how the investigators narrow the group of suspects. You see how they use electronic devices to, excuse me.

I'm going to start that over. In those live, in those true crime shows, you're often allowed to be in the room when homicide detectives are interviewing suspects, you have the opportunity to see how the investigators narrow the field of suspects. You see how they use electronic devices to sort out where all those people were at the time the homicide occurred. And you also see how things like DNA and APHIS, the automated fingerprint identification system, have changed. When I started writing Beaumont, we were still using fingerprint cards at local homicide, at local cop shops. One of the shows I saw a year ago was web of lies and it was about a 16 year old girl from arizona who started this internet relationship with a guy who told her he was 18 years old and and And he eventually persuaded her to send him nude selfies, which when she tried to get away from him, he threatened to post on the Internet.

And that idea stuck in my head. And I didn't, at the time I watched it, I didn't think, oh, that would make a good Joanna Brady book. But I, by the way, in that instance, the girl was almost driven to suicide and her mother got involved and got the cops involved and put a stop to it. But when it was time to write this Joanna Brady book, I thought back to that show. I didn't think that Jenny would be, Joanna's daughter, would be dumb enough to fall for that trick. So I had to create another character to bring that story into focus. And that's Jenny's college roommate, Beth Rankin. So does Jenny take over more of the story of solving the mysteries and

crisis than Joanna? The thing about the Joanna Brady books is Joanna lives a complicated life. When I started out with her, the reason her husband was late coming to dinner is somebody had murdered him. Somebody had shot him. And she gets involved in finding out what happened to her husband. And my intention to begin with was that Joanna would become an amateur sleuth. But at the end of that book, at Andy's funeral, people say to her, why don't you run for sheriff in Andy's stead? So she wins a write-in campaign. And suddenly there she she is she is a single mother with a young child and a very

complicated job with unpredictable hours and so forth so I told my editor she needs help she needs she needs to get married and my editor said oh no no, don't do that. That will never work. Well, I'm sorry. If you have kids and dogs and horses and so forth, somebody has to be home minding the home fires. Andrew Bletch Dixon, he showed up in book number three. I thought he was one book character, but he kept coming back book after book. And finally they got married. And I don't outline my books.

If I had known when Butch first showed up in book number three, that he was going to be Joanna Brady's second husband and the father of two of her three kids, I would have given him a better name but so now joanna has a college-aged daughter but she also has two little kids a year old baby and a and a primary school son and And so she's always juggling. I think a lot of women, I think most women are constantly juggling responsibilities at work and home, church, family, school, all of those things. And I think that's part of what makes Joanna seem real to my readers. She has the same real concerns that every mother has, but she also has concerns for her department. And in Missing and Endangered, she has sent one of her deputies, one of her deputies has been dispatched to deliver a protection order, a no-contact order to a presumably abusive husband.

And what happens results in the abusive husband being shot dead and Joanna's deputy gravely injured. So she's dealing with an officer-involved shooting on her professional side. She's trying to get ready for Christmas on her homemaker side. And she has a daughter in a very complex situation miles away in Flagstaff. And Jenny is an important part of the story, but it's still Joanna's book. There you go. There you go. Yeah. It's so you've got these undercurrent of different stories going on with Jenny working with, or she's dealing with this issue with Beth and then you've got Joanna and everything else. You mentioned you don't outline

your stories, which I thought was really interesting. How do you, do you just walk through the development of a new book? And where do you find that creative process? Or where do you find those new... I met outlining in sixth grade geography at Greenway School. I hated outlining then. Nothing that has happened to me in the intervening decades has changed my mind about outlining. So when it's time to start a book,

I usually start with somebody dead or dying. And then I write the rest of the book to find out who killed them and how come. I'm working on, I have the next Allie Reynolds book, Unfinished Business, written and due to come out at the beginning of June. And I'm working on the next Beaumont book. The Beaumont book stalled out dead. It would not move forward for a couple of weeks. And I couldn't figure out what was wrong.

Finally, when I went back to it, I found out that I had put too much information in one conversation. And all I needed to do was put part of the conversation with one character and part of the conversation with a different character. And then I was able to move forward. One time I was absolutely stumped. I was writing an alley book and boy, I got to a certain point. In writing a book, I know that the first 20% is the hardest part. The middle 60% is slogging through mud. And the last 20% is the banana peel of the book. And that's really easy to write. But I was at the banana peel and the book wasn't going anywhere. So I turned to my husband and I said, would you read this and tell me how I can finish it? And he read it and he turned to me and he said, why don't you finish it the easy way? So I did. The banana peel.

That's all he told me. Is that the slide? But I can't explain exactly how I do it. When I'm writing a book, I'm writing for the same reason people are reading to find out what happens i i seldom know who the killer is at the beginning of the book i find that out in the course of of telling the story i'm telling the story to myself at the same time i'm telling the story to my readers that is just astounding i think that's just awesome. Like you're basically writing the movie as we're watching it. I think there's a lot of magic in it. And there are, I think the most magical book I ever wrote is Beaumont number 21.

It's called Second Watch. In that book, Thanksgiving that year, the year before, we were having dinner and my 40-something son turned to me and said, Mom, Beaumont is getting pretty long of a tooth. Have you ever thought of writing a Beaumont prequel? And I said, no, Tom, I've never thought about writing a prequel. But then it was August of the following year. It was time to write the next beaumont book and that was the only idea i had you could kill off your son i have i have five kids i have 10 grandkids i had three grand great grandkids brothers and sisters that's a lot of birthdays to remember if you add in all the birthdays and ages of all of my characters, it's ridiculous. So with Beaumont, I gave him my birthday. So I would remember we were both born October 27th of 1944. So I was sitting in my writing chair, thinking about Puma, thinking about how old he was.

And suddenly I remembered a guy from Bisbee High School. Doug Davis was a year ahead of me. He was smart. He was tall. He was handsome. He was an outstanding athlete. In the mornings before Mrs. Phillippe opened the library, Doug and I would both be waiting in the breezeway. And when she unlocked the doors, we'd go in. Doug would go straight to history. I would go straight to fiction.

Doug graduated as the valedictorian of the class of 1961. He went from Bisbee High to West Point, West Point to Ranger School, Ranger School to Vietnam, where he died weeks before his 23rd birthday. I didn't attend his funeral because I was working in Nevada that summer and didn't know about his funeral until after it was already over. And I always felt guilty that I had not honored his passing. But in the intervening years, through happenstance, I had been introduced to and become friends with a woman named Bonnie Abney, who was engaged to marry Doug at the time he died. So I was sitting there thinking about how old Doug was and how old Bo was. And I thought, what would happen if I intertwined Doug's real life with Bo's fictional

life? So I wrote a book called Second Watch. It starts with Beaumont on his way to the hospital for bilateral knee replacement surgery. And my husband had bilateral knee replacement surgery. And while he was under the influence of medications, he was absolutely hilarious, but he also had really vivid dreams. So when Bo is in his hospital room, he's lying there and he looks out and he sees this guy wearing Vietnam era fatigues, standing looking out the window at the space needle. Now, he should have known immediately it was bogus, since the space needle is on the other side of that hospital,

and it would have been impossible to see it. But the guy turns away and comes walking across the room to Bo's bed, and as he comes toward him, Bo realizes that this was Lenny D., Doug, his commanding officer in Vietnam. And Doug walks up to his bed and he looks at Bo and he says, you got old. And of course, Doug never did get old. And that's the background to the story. There are two long, unsolved homicides that Beau solves in the course of that book.

But the real, the important thing is he realizes that when he came back from Vietnam, he was alive. Doug was not. And he never sought Bonnie out, never told her how much he appreciated Doug, and never expressed his condolences. So I wrote that book, and writing it was like magic. It was divine inspiration, I think. And when I finished it, I couldn't quite let go of it. So I wrote the essay that's at the end of that book called The Story Behind Second Watch. And that caused someone who had been in Vietnam with Doug,

someone who had been at West Point with Doug, to go down to his basement and find a photo he took of Doug Davis in Vietnam the day before he died. And he sent that picture to Bonnie and me. She had never seen it. And it's, and Michael Reagan of the Fallen Heroes Project did a pencil drawing of that, a pencil portrait of, of Doug for Bonnie. On the 50th anniversary of Doug's passing, Bonnie went to Bisbee. She spent most of the day at Doug's graveside in Evergreen Cemetery.

And what she found was that people who had read the book had found their way to Bisbee, found their way to the cemetery, found their way to Doug's grave, and had left behind tokens of their esteem. Wow, that's an astounding story. I don't have to feel guilty for not attending Doug's funeral because I have memorialized him in a way that attending the funeral could not possibly have equaled. That's an astounding homage. That is amazing. Life has an interesting way of making these roundabouts where everything comes back, doesn't it? Yes. A couple of years ago, in advance of the Tucson Festival of Books,

the local TV station sent a camera crew to our house in Tucson. And the cameraman turned out to be the grandson, Mrs. Spangler, my second grade teacher. Really? And I was able, and he inherited all those books that were always over under the windows and on her bookshelves in her classroom. And I was able to tell him what a profound influence having his grandmother as my second grade teacher made on my life that is astounding did you get the wizard of oz book by chance did he have it still or I I'm sure you got the wizard of oz book wow that was that's astounding man what a what a way of coming. It's like we mentioned, we talked about it earlier, about how we use our own stories of life,

our own challenges, our own things that we're presented with that we have to overcome. And we put those into our stories of life and they help build not only our characters, but in your case, it helps you build these great characters in the mass of your books. And it doesn't have to be a huge issue. I had a dentist in Bisbee, Arizona, who didn't believe in Novocaine.

And he would generally have three martini lunches. And every little kid in Bisbee who came to him after school to have dental work done came out as a white-knuckled dental patient. That's me. And so in Beaumont No. 5, the victim turns out to be a dentist murdered by one of his own tools. And so years passed. I wrote that book in the late 80s, probably. I went to my 50th high school reunion, and everybody else was still talking about that dentist. But I had recovered because i fixed him in fiction it sounds like it sounds like a lot of uh the revenge writing that you do

is a way of you know catharsisizing or or expelling those uh demons and those those angers i think it's true for me in fiction and i think it's true for someone like joe kenda i think for for him, creating that series, the Homicide Hunter, which is reenactments of many of the cases that he solved over the years, I think it gave him a chance to reflect on them in a way he never had the opportunity to, because as a cop, you go from one case to the next case, to the next case, to the next case. And doing the reflections on those for television was his way of dealing with some of the ghosts from his past in the same way I have done.

There you go. There you go. As we go out, J.A., anything more you want to plug or talk about Missing in Danger to get people getting out to buy that book? In each book, there is one character that wins my heart. And in this book, the character that walked away with the story is a little seven-year-old girl. Her name is Kendall, and she's living in terrible circumstances. But just now, as I said that, now I know where her name came from. Years ago, we had books in our attic, and it was way too heavy a load. And my husband said, we've got to get rid of some of those books or the ceiling is going to collapse. At that point, FedEx would take books and ship them

to people serving in the Middle East. This was during Desert Storm. And so we hauled out 30 boxes of books. I autographed them and they shipped off. Years later, or sometime later, I heard from a guy named Cesar. I can't remember Cesar's last name right now. Just a minute. What? Flores. That was my fat checker from the other room.

Later on, I heard from a fellow by the name of Cesar Flores. He was in an IED, one of those vehicles that was blown up by an IED. He was the only person who survived. And while he was in the hospital, he received one of those books, one of the signed Joanna Brady books. And he was from Texas and reading about Arizona reminded him of home. And he and I became, became friends. And when, when he had,

he and his wife had a daughter And I sent them this lovely blue, lovely pink soft blanket from Nordstrom's as a gift. But his daughter's name is Kendall. And I only just now figured out where that Kendall came from. That's why you did the whole show, so we could provide that epiphany for you. So that's awesome. What a great journey. This has been like a lesson in writing for this whole hour. It's just amazing. Thank you.

I love telling stories, both verbal and in the written word. This is what makes you so great. And like I said before, the beauty of the novels that I have on my show is seeing how the inner wave, their experience of life and the challenges of life and things that they go through into their stories and how we learn from stories. And that's what makes most books so great

and stories so great, why we love movies and everything else. Unfortunately, I used to be a story collector. I love collecting stories and listening to stories and hearing people hearing stories. And I didn't understand how important that the story was. Well, the ancient sacred charge of the storyteller is to be kind of the time. And during this pandemic, we've all had way too much time in need of beguiling. But I want to let new readers know, don't be put off by the idea that, oh, this is book number 19. If I start reading this, I won't have any idea who these people are. When I start a book, I try to include enough information so that new readers will feel

at home. And so old readers won't be bored to tears. That's one thing I usually ask people that do multiple novels with characters like you do, is if they jump in right in the middle of wherever they are in the book series, if they'll be able to keep up with it. Give us your plugs, J.A., as we go out, where people can find you on the interwebs,

getting you involved with your newsletter, order up your book. Jajans.com is my website my schedule is posted there my weekly blog is posted there i don't i don't sell my books from myself i'm smart enough to write the books not smart enough to take the money but you can buy them at booksellers all over the country and all of my books all of them are still in print that is awesome that means they're still being consumed people are buying them and eating them up yes that's awesome the early beaumont books are really historical fiction now because he's always looking for a payphone and a quarter. I remember those days, actually. But that's a beautiful endowment and compliment to you that

people are still consuming these books, loving the story. And we've seen that over the past hour. This has been amazing spending this wonderful time with you. Thank you for spending it with us and sharing your story. Thank youris or your stories i should say thank you very much it was a joy for me and i'm glad we helped you through that whole epiphany thing with figuring out who your character was in the book yes i'm going to go send an email to cesar right now awesome that is so awesome to my audience thank you for jay for being with us today check out her library of books holy. She's pretty much got a whole library there and you can order them up on all the different places. Her newest book, Missing

and Endangered, a Brady novel of suspense. She's a New York Times bestselling author. This is from William Morrow Books as well. So check that out, guys. If you want to see the video version of this that I've really enjoyed spending time with her, go to youtube.com, Fortuness Chris Voss, hit the bell bell notification you can follow all the books for reading and reviewing on goodreads.com fortune s chris voss you can also find jay chance there as well go to all our multiple facebook groups linkedin instagram accounts and all that good stuff and you'll see more about what we're doing there thanks to jay for being with us thanks for tuning in wear your mask stay safe and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Jay.