The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Nothing to Lose: A J.P. Beaumont Novel (J. P. Beaumont, 25) by J. A Jance

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Nothing to Lose: A J.P. Beaumont Novel (J. P. Beaumont, 25) by J. A Jance The newest thrilling Beaumont suspense novel from New York Times bestselling author J. A. Jance, in which Beaumont is approached by a visitor from the past and finds himself drawn into a missing person’s case where danger is lurking and family secrets are exposed. Years ago, when he was a homicide detective with the Seattle PD, J. P. Beaumont’s partner, Sue Danielson, was murdered. Volatile and angry, Danielson’s ex-husband came after her in her home and, with nowhere else to turn, Jared, Sue’s teenage son, frantically called Beau for help. As Beau rushed to the scene, he urged Jared to grab his younger brother and flee the house. In the end, Beaumont’s plea and Jared’s quick action saved the two boys from their father’s murderous rage. Now, almost twenty years later, Jared reappears in Beau’s life seeking his help once again—his younger brother Chris is missing. Still haunted by the events of that tragic night, Beau doesn’t hesitate to take on the case. Following a lead all the way to the wilds of wintertime Alaska, he encounters a tangled web of family secrets in which a killer with nothing to lose is waiting to take another life.

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 is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in today we're honored to have a guest as a second time on the show j.a jance she's going to

be talking to us about her newest book it's coming out february 22 22 so 2 22 22 gotta love it's all twos and her new book is called nothing to lose a jp beaumont novel and this is i believe 25 in the series i'll get a correction from her, I'm sure, here in a second. But she is on the show with us to talk about her new book. Welcome to the show, Mrs. Jantz. How are you? I'm just fine, thank you. There you go.

Did I get that right? Is it the 25th in the series? It's the 25th in the series. Okay. But Beau is sort of a sneaky character. He manages to work his way into other places as well. And so there are two books where he appears with Joanna Brady in her series. There's one of the Walker books where Beaumont shows up.

And he also turns up in last year's Allie Reynolds book, Unfinished Business. So he's a guy who gets around. There you go. So before we get into the new book, let's lay a foundation. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs in order of the book, please. Well,

my website is jajance.com. That's hard to remember. I have a weekly blog, which is sort of a window on my world of what's going on in my life in any particular week. You can go back through the archives and read, I think, 14 or 15 years of those blogs. So that's like reading my autobiography in weekly dramas. I also have a newsletter. And when people send me an email, I'm the one who responds to the emails.

I don't have a secretary who does the responding. I'm the one who does it. Autocorrect misspellings and all last week I tried to send someone a note saying thank you for being a loyal reader and autocorrect changed it to a local reader and of course to somebody who lived across the country

but not all the typos are mine personally but yes this is my 25th beaumont book but i have over 60 books all of them in print in four different series which isn't bad for a girl who was told in 1964 that i wouldn't be allowed to enroll in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona because I was a girl. And so having all of those books out, many of them on the New York Times bestseller list is sort of the world's best revenge against that guy. I've looked and as far as I can tell, the guy who taught creative writing

at the University of Arizona never had anything published. So how dare he tell me I couldn't write. Well, this is quite an accomplishment. I just got my first book out last year, my very first one. I'm 54, so I got to really work hard to catch up to you. It was 60 books. Well, I didn't start until I was 38. The first book I wrote was never published by anybody because it was 1,200 pages long. Since I wasn't allowed in the creative writing program, I didn't know that there were some things I should leave out, so I put everything in. While that book was out, I did find an agent,

and the agent wasn't able to sell the book. For good reason. It wasn't ready for prime time. But a lot of first-time writers, if they find an agent who isn't able to sell the first book they fire that agent keep the manuscript and get a new agent what I did was fire the manuscript and keep the agent and so that original agent who didn't sell my first book is still my agent all these years later but well that book was out on the turndown trail she suggested I try writing something that was totally fictional that was sort of a thinly

fictionalized true crime that first book that never got published so I was living in Seattle I was a divorced single mom with a full-time job selling life insurance. And in the fall of 1982, I started trying to write a detective novel based in Seattle. So I created this character. I named him J.P. Beaumont, Jonas Piedmont Beaumont. I gave him a place to live in the Denny Regret area of Seattle, now called Belltown, by the way. And I gave him a job.

He was a full-time homicide cop for Seattle PD. And then I sat back and waited for him to do something and he didn't do a blooming thing for months I could not I couldn't get that book to gel it just it wouldn't work no matter what I did it wouldn't work so finally in March of 1983 I sent my kids to Camp Orkila for spring break. And then I got on the train here in Seattle to go to Portland to visit one of my friends from my life insurance days for the five days while my kids were at camp. I got on the train with a stack of new blue line notebooks and a fistful of ballpoint 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? That's what I thought. And then I thought,

well, why don't we try it? So I got out a notebook. I got out a pen. And I wrote the words, she might have been a cute kid once. That was hard to tell now. She was dead. All of a sudden, there I was on the back of Magnolia Bluff in Seattle. I was walking around a crime scene in J.P. Beaumont's shoes. I was seeing what he saw. I was hearing what he heard. I was hearing what he said, but I was also hearing what was going

on inside his head. And J.P. Beaumont and J.A. Jantz have been character and author for 40 years now. Wow, that's amazing. Incredible serendipity. While I was in Portland that week, I wrote 30,000 words by hand.

I didn't have a computer then. I had blisters on my writing fingers. The story was constructed in my head, but I had to find the right point of view to tell it. And so Beau's my guy. We've been together all this time. We've been together longer than I've been with my second husband. In fact, my second husband and my first date was the grand opening party

for Unto Proven Guilty in 1985. But what I like about Beau is his sort of quirky sense of humor. He surprises me on more than one occasion. He was a full-time cop when I started writing about him. And he couldn't be at work all the time. So I needed to give him something to do when he wasn't at work. Well, I spent 18 years of my life with a guy who died of chronic alcoholism at age 42, a year and a half after I divorced him.

And it turned out I wasn't in the creative writing class where they say write what you know, but I was smart enough to figure that out on my own. So I had Beaumont drink. I knew a lot about drinking, and so I wrote four books in that series. When I sold the book, I thought it was a standalone book. Avon Books bought it as a series,

and then I had to figure out how to keep on going. So the fourth book in that series came out. I was down in Portland again doing a book signing at walden books in the mall down there i was sitting out in the mall's hallway with my books on a card table in front of me and a woman came up to the table and she said beau drinks every day. He has a drink of choice. It's starting to interfere with his work. Does J.P. Beaumont have a problem? Look at her, and I said, these are books.

But in the course of that set of signings, six other people asked me the same question. Wow. me the same question. And I realized that what I had put into the book was a very realistic view of someone who is a serious drinker and who has not yet come to terms with it. So that was in book four. Beau goes into treatment and he has his first blackout, undeniable blackout. He's had them before, but he can always talk his way out of them before. He has his first blackout in book number seven. He's in treatment in number eight. And so he's been sober for way more books than he was drinking.

But I still have people who tell me they liked him better when he was drunk. I'm worried about this. Well, he can always fall off the horse. But what I find is whenever it's time to write a Beaumont book, he's grown, he's changed over the years. He's reconciled with his kids. He's married a wonderful woman. He's left Seattle PD. He worked for the Attorney General for a while, and now he's retired. So in the course

of our being together as character and author for 40 years, we both changed. We both got older. But what's consistent about Beau is whenever it's time for me to write a book about him, within the first couple of paragraphs even, I'm hearing his voice and hearing his quirky sense of humor. And at the beginning of Nothing to Lose, he begins with the unfortunate announcement from Mel Soames, his wife, that the shower isn't draining. Oh. This is bad news. But that's one of the fun things about my books. Little pieces of my own history end up in the stories. And they're so implausible, people think, well, that couldn't possibly happen. that I have an up-close and personal relationship with the kinds of plumbing difficulties that can develop if you attempt to flush an Irish wool-pound-sized piece of frozen doggy doo-doo down interior plumbing.

Oh, that sounds like an adventure in and of itself. So tell us about the new book, Nothing to Lose, and what's inside of it. What's going on these days? Well, it starts with the plumbing problem and moves on from there. Sounds like Wednesdays at my house. In book number 14, a book called Breach of Duty, J.P. Beaumont's then partner, Sue Danielson, is murdered by an abusive ex-husband. And people were shocked when Sue Danielson died. I was shocked when Sue Danielson died. But the thing about domestic violence is we all pretend that doesn't happen to anybody. We know it only happens to other people. And of course, by then, all my readers knew Sue Danielson, and they were really attached to her. And so when she dies at her former husband's hands, it was really shocking. But that event, Sue Danielson's death, was a real watershed moment for Beau. It was what propelled him to pull the plug on his career at Seattle PD.

It was what set him off working for the Attorney General's office for a number of years. But that event still haunts him. It's something that comes back to him in nightmares over and over, PTSD. And so that incident is still very much a part of his life. That night, Sue Danielson's young sons, Jared and Chris, were in the other room when their father came in and was having this terrible row with their mother. And Jared reached out to Bo, and Bo said, take your brother, get the hell out

of there, and somebody will come get you, but you get yourself as far away from the incident as you can. And because Jared did as he was told, he and Christopher survived that night when their mother did not. Oh, wow. So now, on this morning, when J.P. Beaumont is retired, dealing with a plumbing problem and B, decorating for Christmas, there's a knock on the door, and here is this young man in priestly attire who tells him his name is jared danielson and he's come to beaumont asking for help

in finding his younger brother chris who is now a missing person oh so of course beau says yes to take on on this task because he has skin in the game. And Jared disappeared in – or Jared Christopher disappeared in Alaska. And so Beaumont heads off to Alaska in the dead of December when he never expected to go to Alaska in December. And so a lot of this book takes place in wintertime Alaska. Ah, cold. That's a heck of a time to go there, too. So that's what the book is about.

I spent five years as a K-12 librarian on the Tohono O'odham Reservation west of Tucson. I told 26 stories a week in K-6 classrooms. Some of the stories were the stories we all heard growing up, Little Engine That Could, Molly Whoopi, Cinderella, all of those. But I also learned and told the legends and stories of the Tohono O'odham people, the desert people. And one of the hallmarks of Tohono O'odham storytelling is that a story must end where it begins.

And it's interesting to see how that principle has meandered into the way I write stories. It's true in the most recent Alley book, Unfinished Business, which starts and ends in a prison in Monroe, Washington. And it's true in this book as well. That's amazing, man. That's amazing. So is this a new territory for you to take a character to Alaska and write up in that area? Is it?

I'm sorry. Is it new territory for you to write about a character up in the winters of Alaska? New territory. I visited Alaska a couple of times, and I have friends up there who were able to help me with some of the details of the story. There are some, they don't have counties the way other states do. They have different kinds of... In Tucson, the University of Alaska at Anchorage,

U of A, A, A, you've got to get those terms right for the people who live there. Otherwise, they're going to throw the book away. write for the people who live there. Otherwise, I asked my friend, Diana Conway, is there a word, there's a character in this book that I really love. As soon as I met Twinkle Winkleman, she was just the cat's pajamas. And so I asked my friend Diana, is there a word for people from outside who come to Alaska and know absolutely nothing about it? And she said, yes, the word is chichaco.

And I was sure I had never heard that term before. Of course, I used it in the book. But then I mentioned that terminology in one of my blogs, and someone immediately sent me a totally politically incorrect recording of an old time song. Squaws along the Yukon are good enough for me. And the word Chichaco is in that song. So I've had that word before, but I didn't remember it. That's amazing. Wow. And so what are some other things you can tease out about the book for readers?

I'm sorry, I didn't hear that. What are some of the other things you can tease out about the book for readers? What's inside of it? Well, Twink. I think she is tough. She is determined. She is determined. My husband is a gearhead, and I'm a secondhand gearhead. So for years we have watched Motor Trend wheeler dealers. And last year they had an episode

where they rehabbed a 1950-something international harvester carry-all. Well, I didn't even know I knew International Harvester did tractors, but I didn't know that they built the first

SUV-style suburban kind of vehicle. And as soon as I met Twinkle Winkleman, I knew that was exactly the vehicle that she had to drive. So she's a shuttle driver, but her carry-all, the luggage rack overhead,

is stocked with spare parts. Oh, really? Well, gasoline and spare parts. So if she has any kind of car trouble when she's out in the wilderness, she can fix it herself. She is a very interesting woman. But her name is Twinkle Winkleman. And when I created that name, I was thinking about that old Johnny Cash song about a boy named Sue.

She's had the same kind of difficulties with her name, Twink, as Sue had with his name. This is quite unique at all. So how are you doing with new books? Are you planning on – I mean, this one stands alone, right? So people can read this one if they haven't read the other ones in the series? One of the reviewers said that they had never read any of them, and they said, you just pick it up and go.

But I have a secret. For years, people have told me that reading my books is like eating Fritos because you can't read just one. I have that problem. And if people end up liking this one, even if they're brand new to the series, they may want to go back and start from the beginning. I have

IORs who are in-order readers. I have DTRs. Those are dead tree readers. Those are people who only read books, either hardback or paperback. Then there are SERs. Those are the sharp-eyed readers who spot typos and send them to me by express mail.

So a lot of the people who start with a new book will go all the way back to the beginning and start over. And, of course, if they meet Beau in those early years when he was still drinking and carousing, they might not like him very much. And it turns out in the book before, the Beaumont book before this, one of his carousing nights came back to haunt him in the form of a granddaughter he never knew. Oh. From a child he never knew he had. So those early years of being sort of wild and woolly still impact his life.

But what happened at the beginning is still part of his life in his 70s. And I think that's true for all of us. We all carry all that stuff, all that baggage from long ago with us, and we have to decide what we're going to do with it for good and ill or ill. And I try to make that be true for my characters. That's pretty awesome. That's pretty awesome. So this is pretty interesting.

I have to remember a lot of stuff, though. Yeah, I mean, you've got 25 volumes of this, gentlemen. You're like, okay, did we do this with them? I was doing a signing for the seventh or eighth Joanna Brady

book. And I was at a book signing, and there were people in line, and there was a couple. There were about 10 people back in the line, and they were just grinning at me. And I thought, okay, when you're an author, you sort of have to be situationally aware of what's happening in book signing because generally speaking speaking there's at least one nutcase in the room like the one that i remember most vividly is the guy who came up to

the table and said are you the lady who writes the murder mysteries i said yes he says i've just been acquitted of murdering seven people do you want to write my book? Holy moly. So I'm aware of the people in line at book signing. That's an awful story. Whoever these people are, they're going to be the ones. So they came up to the table, and the guy introduced himself. And he said, are you aware that a character with my name died in Joanna Brady number one and now he's alive again in this book? That was, that's when I started making a character list.

Oh, really? Before that, I sort of remembered stuff and it took a while for me to paint my way out of that corner. I had to – I made the guy who is in the book, the later book, be the nephew and namesake of the guy who got knocked off early. But I had to paint my way out of that corner. That'll do it. That'll definitely do it. Well, this has been awesome. It's exciting to

see that you're still writing books you i imagine are there more books for the beaumont series on the slate i i'm writing the next ali reynolds book right now and i don't know what'll be next after that i've sold more books so i'm going to have to write them and i can see that the yard man has appeared the he's got the weed blower oh as soon as my two dachshunds are aware of that they are going to come racing in and raise hell well let's round this out it's been wonderful to see you again judas thanks for coming on the show again we certainly appreciate it thank you i've appreciated being. And please send me a note when this is live so I can let my fans know. We certainly will. And then give us your plugs one more time.

The dot com is wherever you want people to go find you on the interims. J-A-J-A-N-C-E dot com. And my blog posts on the blog, both on my Facebook author page and on the blog every Friday morning. I told you. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Guys, order up our book, Nothing to Lose.

And if you want to get that, you can order it on Amazon or wherever it's sold. Sorry. Nothing to Lose, A.J.P. Beaumont. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Thanks, Judith, for being here. And continued success. Thank you very much.

All right.