When her daughter, Jenny, stumbles across the dead 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 is not prepared for the knowledge she is about to uncover. Though she has tried to protect her children from the dangers...

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.

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.

"Sheriff Joanna Brady has a lot on her plate--she is up for re-election as sheriff, pregnant with her third child, and her eldest is packing up to leave for college. Then Joanna is woken in the middle of the night by a call reporting a motor vehicle accident. Her mother and stepfathers RV ran off the road at high speed and hit the pillar of an overpass. Something about the accident seems suspicious, though, and when Joanna gets a call from Ali Reynolds,...