“I usually start with somebody dead,” said author J.A. Jance, of her process. “I spend the rest of the book trying to figure out who did it, and how come.”
Jance, who this year celebrates the 40th anniversary of creating her beloved Seattle homicide detective J.P. Beaumont (she began her first Beaumont novel, “Until Proven Guilty” in 1983; it was published two years later), doesn’t go for planning out her stories in advance. “I met outlining in Mrs. Watkins’ sixth-grade geography class in Bisbee, Ariz.,” she said, in a telephone interview from her Bellevue home. (Jance and her husband split their time between the Northwest and Southwest.) She hated outlining then, and she hates it now. “I write for the same reason people read,” she said. “I want to know what happened.”
Over four decades of writing and much acclaim, a lot has happened. Jance has written more than 60 books, many of them bestsellers, with a remarkable career total of more than 20 million copies sold. Most of her books fit into four franchises, featuring Beaumont (her most longstanding series; she just completed book number 26, to be published next year), Arizona journalist Ali Reynolds, Arizona law enforcement officer Joanna Brady, and the Walker family, an interconnected series set in the Southwest that frequently draws on Jance’s memories of working on Indigenous reservations as a librarian and teacher.
Her newest book, “Blessing of the Lost Girls” (William Morrow, out now), fits into the latter group. A serial-killer drama involving a series of murdered Indigenous women, it was, Jance said, the book that brought her mojo back. Her previous book, an Ali Reynolds installment, was unusually challenging: Though Jance usually completes a book in about six months, “Collateral Damage” took twice that. “After struggling with that book for a whole year, I thought, this is probably my last book,” she said. “I’ll never be able to write another one.”