Lone Cone Library

Big-city homicide detective J. P. Beaumont and small-town sheriff/mom Joanna Brady join forces once again to solve a case involving a series of murders--six young women wrapped in tarps, doused with gasoline, and set on fire; and one elderly caretaker run over and left to die.

Seattle investigator J. P. Beaumont is working a series of murders in which six young women have been wrapped in tarps, doused with gasoline, and set on fire. Their charred remains have been scattered around various dump sites, creating a grisly pattern of death across western Washington. At the same time, thousands of miles away in the Arizona desert, Cochise County sheriff Joanna Brady is looking into a homicide in which the elderly caretaker of...

The intense desert heat has brought a nightmare to a small corner of the Southwest. A body lies lifeless in an airless trailer, surrounded by seventeen others. It is a crime unspeakable in conception and execution-a horror strangely connected to a grisly slaughter in a neighboring state, where the corpses of two women are found gruesomely posed on a rancher's land. A day that started out hot has already turned blistering for Joanna Brady, the sheriff...

Joanna Brady is nine months pregnant when the mutilated body of an unidentified man is found in the desert. Then, one of the Animal Control officers on a stakeout, is so severely beaten that her prospects for survival are uncertain. Soon Joanna's life becomes even more complicated when her in-laws arrive uninvited for the birth of their grandchild.

A twisted and lethal drama is unfolding in this small corner of the southwestern desert as fear, hatred, and the evil at the core of one family's history come to a rapid boil beneath a merciless Arizona sun.

A woman is lying dead in the stillness of an airless trailer. Why someone would murder the homeless loner is only one of the questions nagging at the police. Why did the killer use an 85-year-old bullet, fired from the gun used in the brutal murder of two other women? The slayings are as oppressive as the 100 degree heat for Sheriff Joanna Brady in Cochise County, Arizona. She must put marital distractions and an opponent's dirty tricks aside to deal...

Sheriff Joanna Brady has a lot on her plate--she is up for re-election as sheriff, pregnant with her third child, and her eldest is packing up to leave for college. Then Joanna is woken in the middle of the night by a call reporting a motor vehicle accident. Her mother and stepfathers RV ran off the road at high speed and hit the pillar of an overpass. Something about the accident seems suspicious, though, and when Joanna gets a call from Ali Reynolds,...