DAMAGE CONTROL
by J.A. Jance
As usual, Sheriff Joanna Brady has a lot on her plate, some of it related to law enforcement.
Husbands don’t come any better than the one Joanna’s brought to the altar. Sensitive, loving, endlessly accepting his status as second banana, Butch Dixon is a stay-at-home treasure. It’s Butch’s enduring selflessness that enables Joanna to cope with “death, murder, and mayhem” brilliantly enough to keep getting elected in crime-beset Cochise County, Ariz. But now that Butch’s first novel is about to hit the stores, and his publisher wants him to help promote it, he wonders what arrangements he can make for four-month-old Baby Dennis while he takes to the road on a book tour. Joanna makes it amply clear that he’s not going to make her solely responsible for their son. Not with what might prove a double homicide to solve. Not while the battling Beasley sisters continue to show such potential for violence. Not when her mother has left Joanna the journals of her late father to peruse in order to determine the precise degree to which he’d strayed. Still, Joanna knows that attention must be paid to Saint Butch, lest he too start to compile material for his own journal.
Standard Jance (Justice Denied, 2007, etc.): chick-lit dappled with detection.