This had been sitting around at the library just waiting for me to pick it up because back when I first sampled it it sounded intriguing. It’s the latest in the J.P. Beaumont series from JA Jance’s (2021). Just to be clear – I’ve never read a book by Jance (that I recall) and I’m starting this series at book #24 (2019). I have no idea if I’ll read more of them but my guess is not.

Sins of the Fathers 
by J.A. Jance
2019 (384 pages)
Read by Alan Sklar 13h 10m
Rating:  B / crime – PI (legal)
(#24 in JP Beaumont series)

I tried to like this and I might have, but the narrator grated on me – his reading was just a tad too slow and carefully enunciated.  I don’t think I’ve read a book by Jance before this, but she has 40+ on the market so I thought I’d at least try one.  The story is different and okay, I suppose. The characters are good except not quite differentiated as much as maybe should be. The setting of Seattle is simply there – as usual in tis series I suppose.

J.P. Beaumont (Beau), now retired from the Seattle police department, is visited by his old friend Alan Dale who needs help locating his daughter who left a local hospital where she abandoned her newborn daughter.  Alan, a widower, has the child in his arms on Beau’s doorstep, but is very concerned about his daughter, a long term drug addict and alcoholic.  Beau agrees to help and ends up involved in a whole lot more than a missing young woman, including the body of a murdered young man found at the junk yard and … well,  it gets complicated. For one thing there’s a lot of money and tangled relationships involved.  

 This novel is not so violent as some of the books I’ve been reading lately so that’s a kind of relief.  Still, I won’t buy a Jance book, but I might get one if it’s available at the library. There are just too many books available by authors I know I enjoy and with narrators who are a delight to my ears. .