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J P Beaumont, a retired Seattle police detective, is now employed by the Washington State Attorney General in the improbably named Special Homicide Investigation Team, commonly called the SHIT squad. Another detective, Mel Soames is Beau‛s partner at work and his live-in mistress at home. The AG, Ross Alan Connors, has handed them both hush-hush assignments, Beau to find out why a young black ex-con, La Shawn Tompkins who was working at a mission to save other ex-cons, has just been murdered, and she to collate information about sex abusers, most of whom have served prison time. Thereafter, Jance serves readers a large platter of red herrings, making the supposedly brilliant detectives look rather dense. They ignore or misjudge a handful of clues, which for the most part is just as well, since the greater part of them would lead them astray in any event. The head of the mission where Tompkins was working comes in and out of the story in a belligerent way; one of Tompkins‛s fellow employees goes missing; a mysterious nun appears and disappears in places where she really shouldn‛t have been in the first place such as in Mexico (when I lived in anti-clerical Mexico several hundred years ago, or so it seems, it was illegal; for priests and nuns to wear clerical garb in public, but things might have changed); and a women‛s group, the Seattle Area Sexual Assault Consortium ( SASAC), which Mel Soames is a member of, appears prominently in the story Our two make some assumptions that people a lot less astutely suspicious than they are supposed to be would probably not make, and so the story lasts longer than it should. Additionally, there is the character issue. Mystery writers have been given to understand that readers want not just plot but "character" in their stories. However, "character" these days seems to be understood as giving the protagonist family problems, and Beau has even more family problems than missed clues. From all this you might think I didn‛t like JUSTICE DENIED, but you‛d be wrong. I found it most enjoyable. It is always a pleasure to follow Beau through the streets and joints of Seattle (where I also once lived), and Jance is a wonderful writer at presenting a puzzle and then leading the reader through an intricate maze of red herrings and real clues with the pace ever accelerating. Although for my taste too much time was spent on Beau‛s family and personal problems, I know there are many readers who enjoy them vastly, and Jance does manage to help us meet some really interesting personalities along the way. Neither will I (for personal reasons) find fault with having Beau co-habit with a much younger woman. Go ahead, read the book, which although not one of Jance‛s best, is worthwhile as all her stories are.
Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, October 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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