"Exit Wounds”   by J.A. Jance

Review #76 

A Sheriff Joanna Brady novel

The heat is a killer in Cochise County, Arizona, with temperatures over 100 degrees.

It's the Fourth of July, and Brady is racing from event to event, unofficially campaigning for re-election, when she learns that a woman has been found dead in a mobile home, surrounded by 17 dead dogs. The dogs died of the blazing desert heat, but Carol Mossman was shot.

Then...Joanna receives reports on two more female bodies that have turned up in a nearby county in New Mexico. Ballistics reveal that the same gun was used in both crimes.

Meanwhile, Joanna and her husband are delighted to learn that she's pregnant. Morning sickness and eating aversions play a larger role in Sheriff Brady's day than she would like, but she struggles on with the minutiae of a sheriff's life.

Clues to the three murders are slow in coming, but eventually Joanna learns that Carol's father, Ed Mossman, belonged to a cult called the Brethren for many years, and the two women who were murdered in New Mexico were in the midst of producing a report on the publicity-shy group.

Joanna starts to believe that the more she learns about the Mossman family and the Brethren, the closer she'll be to solving the murders.

Joanna Brady's life is never simple, always busy, and full of questions large and small about human nature.

J.A. Jance has given us another great story!