ICE: The sixth body was found by a snowplow driver who'd pulled off along a deserted forest road for a little privacy. Except for the yellow snow nearby, the remains were essentially the same as the other five corpses scattered in the Cascades; young, female, wrapped in a tarp and soaked with gasoline before being set afire in the woods. This time, though, the cops (in the person of J. P. "Beau" Beaumont) caught a break and identified her as Marina Aguirre, reported missing by her fiancé a couple of months back. Problem being, the social security number the pretty Denny's waitress had been using belonged to a girl who'd died at age eight...
FIRE: The buzzards were the giveaway - that and a loyal dog who refused to leave his master's side, even if his master had taken the pooch for a walk for the last time. Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady answered the call at a remote 4-wheeler park with the rest of her homicide team and...
ICE: The Arizona plates on the dead woman's 4Runner led back to Tucson...
FIRE: it looked as though someone had been using the 4-wheeler park as a drug-smuggling drop...
ICE: ...time to call Bisbee...
FIRE: ...a call from Seattle...
Fire and Ice: what a surprise! Not. The last time J. A. Jance's two¹ protagonists met (2002's Partner in Crime), sparks flew - first professional, then personal. Brady, though, is now a new(ish) mother, and Beaumont has himself a new wife (his third); so any mention of the other party in that little episode means pure embarrassment on both fronts. It would be far more interesting if the two were to meet face-to-face, but Jance takes the easy way out and Beaumont and Brady merely swap a few telephone calls. Chicken! Heck, the redheaded Brady only blushes once...
This time the two meet, Jance's plot is contrived from the get-go, with eventual interaction between the two officers about as surprising as Brett Favre's latest un-retirement. As soon as the word "Arizona" shows up in the Seattle plot line, it's clearly a done deal. The real identity of the dead woman is ab-so-lute-ly unsurprising, too. The main plot of Fire and Ice is, unfortunately, every bit as dead as the woman in the tarp. The sole redeeming feature of the novel is a secondary plot in Arizona that involves a local nursing home - and it's not all that great. For some reason, Jance has decided that Joanna Brady must clash with everyone she meets: the new Cochise County ME, the head of the county health department, the local newspaper reporter - you name it, she's squabbling with whomever it is. It's a wonder she ever got re-elected if she's this combative...
Be that as it may, the weakness of the plot and the surliness of at least one of the twin protagonists aren't the only problems with Fire and Ice. Though it's ostensibly about two interrelated murders - one in Arizona and one in Washington - the Arizona murder is never actually solved. For that matter, the one in Washington isn't actually solved, either - things just kind of peter out.
And that's probably a good thing. The novel is already fairly rocky, suffering from factual errors about the geography of southeastern Arizona and other topics, and the occasional grammatical or spelling error. None of those would be terribly off-putting if the plot carried the book, but it doesn't. Too much page space is devoted to background information for fans of the other series (which Jance did already in Partner in Crime), leaving the narrative too thin to support both murder mysteries and Joanna's cozy moments.
Unfortunately, Fire and Ice will satisfy the fans of neither Brady nor Beaumont. The only good thing about the mishmash is that Jance didn't ring in Ali Reynolds as well: that would have been too much to bear.
¹ this was before Jance introduced protagonist number three, Alison "Ali" Reynolds, in the [insert word]of Evil series. Ahhh, the good old days.
Beau and Brady join forces once again in New York Times -bestselling author Jance s most stunning and suspenseful work to date. Jance delivers a devil...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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