Collateral Damage by J.A. Jance
320 pages, ebook
Publication March 14, 2023
Genre: Mystery Thriller
Taken from Goodreads: Ali Reynolds and High Noon Enterprises face
the dangerous consequences of one man’s desperate search for revenge in this
unputdownable thriller from J.A. Jance, the New York Times bestselling
author who “has been delivering must-read books for a long time” (The Real
Book Spy).
After spending twenty years behind bars, Frank Muñoz, a disgraced former cop,
is out on parole and focused on just one thing: revenge. The wife who abandoned
him after his arrest, the mistress who ratted him out for abetting a
money-laundering scheme, the detectives who presided over his case all those
years ago—they all have targets on their backs.
For Ali Reynolds, the first Christmas without her father is riddled with grief
and uncertainty. And with her husband and founding partner of High Noon
Enterprises, B. Simpson, preoccupied by an upcoming New Year’s trip to London,
she is ready for a break. But when Stu Ramey barges into her home with grave
news about a serious—and suspicious—accident on the highway to Phoenix
involving B.’s car, things reach a breaking point.
At the hospital, a groggy, post-op B. insists that Ali take his place at a
ransomware conference in London, as troubles brimming around High Noon come to
light. But questions remain: Who would go to such lengths to cut the tech
company from the picture? And what if Ali and the rest of the team are also in
danger?
My Thoughts:
I was desperate for a book that I would lose myself
in. J.A. Jance wrote that book. Collateral Damage is a mystery thriller that
had me hooked from the first chapter and kept me turning pages until I turned
the last one. Even with the last page
turn, I was left wanting more.
This book tells of a suspicious car accident that Ali’s
husband, B., was in. Ali cannot let it
rest in the police’s hand. She does her
own investigating with the help of the people at High Noon and starts to put it
all together. I enjoyed watching her
work to solve the mystery but also how much she takes care of B. while he works
to heal.
I have read a few of the other books in the Ali Reynolds
series but not them all. I really like
that this series can be read as a standalone.
Each book has its own mystery but is solved by the end. I am
excited to find more books in this series and continue reading more of Ali
Reynolds and her skills at solving mysteries.
Thank you Gallery Books for the copy of the book via
NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
Add to your MUST-READ list on Goodreads
Purchase your own copy on Amazon or Barnes
and Noble
Meet J.A. Jance (Taken from Goodreads):
As a second-grader in Mrs. Spangler’s Greenway
School class, I was introduced to Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series. I read the
first one and was hooked and knew, from that moment on, that I wanted to be a
writer.
The third child in a large family, I was four years younger
than my next older sister and four years older than the next younger sibling.
Being both too young and too old left me alone in a crowd and helped turn me
into an introspective reader and a top student. When I graduated from Bisbee
High School in 1962, I received an academic scholarship that made me the first
person in my family to attend a four year college. I graduated in 1966 with a
degree in English and Secondary Education. In 1970 I received my M. Ed. in
Library Science. ﾠI
taught high school English at Tucson’s Pueblo High School for two years and was
a K-12 librarian at Indian Oasis School District in Sells, Arizona for five
years.
My ambitions to become a writer were frustrated in college
and later, first because the professor who taught creative writing at the
University of Arizona in those days thought girls "ought to be teachers or
nurses" rather than writers. After he refused me admission to the program,
I did the next best thing: I married a man who was allowed in the program that
was closed to me. My first husband imitated Faulkner and Hemingway primarily by
drinking too much and writing too little. Despite the fact that he was allowed
in the creative writing program, he never had anything published either prior
to or after his death from chronic alcoholism at age forty-two. That didn’t
keep him from telling me, however, that there would be only one writer in our
family, and he was it.
My husband made that statement in 1968 after I had received
a favorable letter from an editor in New York who was interested in publishing
a children’s story I had written. Because I was a newly wed wife who was
interested in staying married, I put my writing ambitions on hold. Other than
writing poetry in the dark of night when my husband was asleep (see After the
Fire), I did nothing more about writing fiction until eleven years later when I
was a single, divorced mother with two children and no child support as well as
a full time job selling life insurance. My first three books were written
between four a.m. and seven a.m. At seven, I would wake my children and send
them off to school. ﾠ After
that, I would get myself ready to go sell life insurance.
I started writing in the middle of March of 1982. The first
book I wrote, a slightly fictionalized version of a series of murders that
happened in Tucson in 1970, was never published. For one thing, it was twelve
hundred pages long. Since I was never allowed in the creative writing classes,
no one had ever told me there were some things I needed to leave out. For
another, the editors who turned it down said that the parts that were real were
totally unbelievable, and the parts that were fiction were fine. ﾠMy agent finally sat me down
and told me that she thought I was a better writer of fiction than I was of
non-fiction. Why, she suggested, didn’t I try my hand at a novel?
The result of that conversation was the first Detective
Beaumont book, Until Proven Guilty. Since 1985 when that was published, there
have been 24 more Beau books. My work also includes 19 Joanna Brady books set
in southeastern Arizona where I grew up, 115 Ali Reynolds books, set in Sedona,
AZ, and five novellas.ﾠ In
addition there are five thrillers, starting with Hour of the Hunter and Kiss of
the Bees, that reflect what I learned during the years when I was teaching on
the Tohono O'Odham reservation west of Tucson, Arizona.
The week before Until Proven Guilty was published, I did a
poetry reading of After the Fire at a widowed retreat sponsored by a group
called WICS (Widowed Information Consultation Services) of King County. By June
of 1985, it was five years after my divorce in 1980 and two years after my
former husband’s death. ﾠI went
to the retreat feeling as though I hadn’t quite had my ticket punched and
didn’t deserve to be there. After all, the other people there were all still
married when their spouses died. I was divorced. At the retreat I met a man
whose wife had died of breast cancer two years to the day and within a matter
of minutes of the time my husband died. We struck up a conversation based on
that coincidence. Six months later, to the dismay of our five children, we told
the kids they weren’t the Brady Bunch, but they'd do, and we got married. We
now have four new in-laws as well as six grandchildren.
When my second husband and I first married, he supported
all of us–his kids and mine as well as the two of us. It was a long time before
my income from writing was anything more than fun money–the Improbable Cause
trip to Walt Disney World; the Minor in Possession memorial powder room; the
Payment in Kind memorial hot tub. Eventually, however, the worm turned. My
husband was able to retire at age 54 and took up golf and oil painting.
One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that
everything–even the bad stuff–is usable. The eighteen years I spent while
married to an alcoholic have helped shape the experience and character of
Detective J. P. Beaumont. My experiences as a single parent have gone into the
background for Joanna Brady–including her first tentative steps toward a new
life after the devastation of losing her husband in Desert Heat. ﾠ And then there’s the evil
creative writing professor in Hour of the Hunter and Kiss of the Bees, but
that’s another story.
Another wonderful part of being a writer is hearing from
fans. I learned on the reservation that the ancient, sacred charge of the
storyteller is to beguile the time. I’m thrilled when I hear that someone has
used my books to get through some particularly difficult illness either as a
patient or as they sit on the sidelines while someone they love is terribly
ill. It gratifies me to know that by immersing themselves in my stories, people
are able to set their own lives aside and live and walk in someone else’s
shoes. It tells me I’m doing a good job at the best job in the world.
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I’m unemployed and down to my last dollar—thank you stranger who bought my coffee when my card was declined this morning. If that wasn’t bad enough, I just T-boned the truck belonging to the guy I was meeting on a first date.
