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    Still Dead: A J.P. Beaumont Novella
    Still Dead: A J.P. Beaumont Novella
    Still Dead: A J.P. Beaumont Novella
    Ebook78 pages1 hour

    Still Dead: A J.P. Beaumont Novella

    By J. A. Jance

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An e-original novella from New York Times bestselling author J. A. Jance, featuring a sneak peek of the next J. P. Beaumont novel, Proof of Life

    Since the disbanding of the Special Homicide Investigation Team, J. P. Beaumont’s biggest concern is pondering whether he and his wife Mel should finally get a dog. But one voicemail from his old friend Ralph Ames is about to change that. Through Ralph, Beau has become involved in an organization called The Last Chance, which enlists a number of retired homicide investigators to tackle long-unsolved cold cases. The one that has just landed on Beau’s plate is a thirty-year-old missing persons case.

    The facts are muddy at best; Janice Marie Harrison’s car was found abandoned near a bridge, and scratched in the dirt nearby was the word “sorry.” It’s possible her death was a suicide, but her body was never found. And as Beau begins to investigate, he discovers that no one connected to Janice—not her once-all-star football player widower, Anders; not her long-grieving sister, Estelle; not sheriff Gavin Loper, who was deputy sheriff at the time of Janice’s disappearance; and not Anders’s second wife Betsy—is exactly what they seem. The question is, which of them knows the truth?

    And why have they kept it buried?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateAug 8, 2017
    ISBN9780062835970
    Author

    J. A. Jance

    J. A. Jance is the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, the Ali Reynolds series, six thrillers about the Walker Family, and one volume of poetry. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, she lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington.

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    3.5/5

    47 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Beau is working on another cold case. Though initially called a suicide, the deceased sister is sure it was murder. Now, decades later, a fingerprint and a lie are about to catch up to the guilty parties. It’s an interesting mystery, and interrupts Beau’s latest dilemma: whether he should get a dog.
    • 3/5
      A short murder mystery at Deception Pass in Washington State. Good plot.

    Book preview

    Still Dead - J. A. Jance

    title page

    Contents

    Cover

    Title Page

    Contents

    Still Dead

    An Excerpt from Proof of Life

    Prologue

    Chapter 1

    About the Author

    Also by J. A. Jance

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    Still Dead

    So, my wife, Mel Soames, said to me offhandedly over coffee one stormy Saturday morning in November, have you given any more thought to maybe getting a dog?

    We were at home in Fairhaven, a part of Bellingham, Washington, sitting in the living room of our recently remodeled and even more recently occupied home. The house is situated on a bluff overlooking Bellingham Bay. That blustery morning, our floor-to-ceiling triple-paned windows offered a relatively unobstructed view of wicked waves hurling themselves toward the perpendicular cliffs at the base of our bluff. When I say relatively unobstructed view, I was referring to the sturdy wooden fence we’d installed at the base of the lawn in order to keep overly adventurous grandchildren from venturing beyond the yard and out onto the cliffs themselves.

    Mel is my third wife—as in third time’s the charm—and I like to think that I’m a little older—well, much older—and a little wiser than I was with numbers one and two. Unlike my younger self, I was able to sense the possible presence of a trap long before the iron jaws themselves clamped shut around my ankle. The fact that I regarded the question as a trap has nothing to do with my hating dogs in general, but there’s some unfortunate history here—with me, dogs, and ankles.

    I met Karen Moffitt, my first wife, back when we were both students at the University of Washington—the U-Dub as it’s affectionately referred to by residents of Washington State. Karen showed up at one of my fraternity’s formals on the arm of one of my frat brothers, a guy by the name of Maxwell Cole. By the end of the evening, Karen and I were an item, and Max was in a permanent state of snit, a situation which has lasted for decades. The fact that Karen and I divorced eventually and she subsequently died of cancer has had no effect on Max. His nose is still out of joint.

    All of this was back in the old days—the sixties. Although dinosaurs no longer roamed the earth, it was still a time when boys taking girls out on first dates were expected to show up on the front porches of family homes, dressed to the nines, and prepared to meet the parents before escorting their daughters out of the house. I was worried about making a good impression on Karen’s father, Amos Moffitt—Pop, as he later insisted I call him—and on her mother, Doris. I should have been more worried about the dog, whose name was Snooks.

    Snooks was an ill-tempered, full-sized, wide-load dachshund who took one look at me and promptly bit a big chunk out of my ankle. One of his canines went straight through my sock and into my Achilles tendon, deep enough to draw blood. Karen’s dad dragged the dog off me and locked him in the kitchen. Karen’s mother treated the wound with mercurochrome and a Band-Aid, all the while assuring me that Snooks had indeed had all his shots. With the bleeding stopped and me noticeably limping, I escorted Karen out of the house to go to a movie—Around the World in Eighty Days, as I recall. As for Snooks? For the next five years, as long as the dog remained on the planet, he viewed me as evil incarnate—a reality that made going to the in-laws’ home for Sunday dinners and holiday get-togethers somewhat problematic.

    So, yes, I admit straight out that I have dog issues. Maybe if I’d had a dog when I was younger and had known something about them, Snooks wouldn’t have regarded me as a mortal enemy, but that wasn’t the case. I grew up as the son of a single mother—an unmarried World War II not-quite widow. My parents hadn’t managed to tie the knot when my father, a sailor based in Bremerton, was killed in a motorcycle accident on his way back home. My mother gave birth to me eight months later, leaving her with all the responsibilities of wartime widowhood and none of the benefits. She raised me totally on her own, with no help either from her family or from my father’s, by working as a seamstress. We lived in an apartment over a bakery in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. The fact that we had no yard automatically precluded the idea of having a dog, nor could we have afforded one. What I do remember is that all my friends who did have dogs were forever complaining about having to take care of them.

    All this is to say that, as far as dogs are concerned, Mel and I might just as well have been raised in separate universes. Mel grew up as an army brat, but her family was always attached to at least one dog as well as the occasional cat. Whenever her father was posted overseas, whatever pets were then in residence were carted off to Mel’s maternal grandparents’ farm near Odessa, Missouri, where they remained for the duration.

    I find it amusing that Mel is always more effusive when it comes to talking about her lifetime’s worth of dogs than she is about Greg, her ex-husband. For example, she’d been far more

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