Paradise Lost (Hardcover)

J.A. Jance returns us to a world of desolate beauty and lonely terror in an extraordinary new novel as heartbreaking and real as it is grippingly intense.

Dora Matthews and Jennifer Brady, both thirteen, couldn't be less alike -- yet the luck of the draw has made them tentmates at a Girl Scout Memorial Day weekend camping trip at Apache Pass. Dora is a wild child, a pregnant, fatherless waif with a missing junkie mother. Jenny is the innocent daughter of Joanna Brady, the sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona. In the cool blackness of the high desert night, they slip away at Dora's prodding. What they find on their unauthorized hike will change their lives forever: the body of a murdered Phoenix heiress, abandoned to scavengers and the elements.

Sheriff Brady fears the traumatic damage that her daughter's grim discovery may have inflicted on the frightened teenager. Now, however, Joanna's foremost concern is the job she was elected to do, and she sets out on the trail of the dead woman's lowlife husband, who cleaned out their accounts before he vanished.

The stakes get drastically higher in very short order when something happens to poor damaged and neglected Dora Matthews that hits Joanna like a runaway truck. Someone believes that the two girls who were where they shouldn't have been two nights earlier are now loose ends that need to be tied up. And Joanna's own Jenny may very well be the next item on a killer's bloody agenda.