Book Review: Justice Denied

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

Justice Denied     Amazon US PB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada PB Amazon Canada HC
J. A. Jance
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Police Procedural
Series: J. P. Beaumont # 18
Morrow, Jul 2007, $25.95

Washington State Attorney general Ross Alan Connors rarely leaves Olympia, but is in Seattle visiting his Special Homicide Investigation Team Squad B homicide detective J.P. Beaumont to discuss a particular case. However first he asks a disingenuous question on workload. J.P. responds by saying he is looking into a MPT (missing persons thing) involving a whistle-blower who vanished twenty-five years ago on the day Mount Saint Helen's erupted in 1980. Ross assigns him to quietly look into the homicide of wrongly convicted gangbanger LaShawn Tompkins, the center of a media circus that was impacting the King’s County prosecutor political race.

As J.P. investigates the murder of Tompkins that looks increasingly like a premeditated hit made to appear like a street incident, his lover and Squad B associate Mel Soames works several related cold cases involving the questionable deaths of sex crime offenders. Through the statistical trend analysis of forensic economist Todd Hatcher and a horde of coincidences, the Tompkins inquiry and the sex offender homicides tie into one monster case for the Squad B partners.

Although an exciting police procedural, there are too many subplots and coincidences that subtract from the overall investigation by grandpa J.P. and not grandma Mel while Todd brings freshness with his statistical analysis forming trends. The story line is action-packed from the moment the lead pair says good bye to his grandchildren after a visit and never slows down until the final confrontation that connects all the workload except the whistleblower inquiry. Fans of the series will enjoy the entertaining Beaumont-Soames detective story.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner

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