When her daughter, Jenny, stumbles across the body of her high school principal, Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady's personal and professional worlds collide, putting her in the difficult middle ground between being an officer of the law and a mother. While investigating murders means discovering unpleasant facts, Joanna isn't prepared for the knowledge she's about to uncover. Though she's tried to protect her children from the dangers of the grown-up...

Cochise County sheriff Joanna Brady investigates the death of handicapped woman who had wandered away from a care facility with a suspicious track record and the deaths of an elderly couple who were presumably consenting partners in a suicide pact.

The intense desert heat has brought horror 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 its conception and execution-a nightmare strangely connected to a grisly slaughter in a neighboring state, where the corpses of two women are found tied up, naked, and gruesomely posed on a rancher's land. A day that started out hot has already turned blistering for...

An old woman, a hoarder, is dying of emphysema in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In cleaning out her house, her daughter, Liza Machett, discovers a fortune in hundred dollar bills hidden in the tall stacks of books and magazines that crowd every corner. Tracing the money's origins will take Liza on a journey that will end in Cochise County, where Sheriff Joanna Brady is embroiled in a personal mystery of her own. A man she considers a family friend...

When Jennifer Brady returns to Northern Arizona University for her sophomore year, she quickly becomes a big sister to her new roommate, Beth Rankin, a brilliant yet sheltered sixteen-year-old freshman. For a home schooled Beth, college is her first taste of both freedom and unfettered access to the Internet, and Jenny is concerned that she's too nave and rebellious for her own good. Her worries are well-founded because one day Beth vanishes, prompting...

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.