Two Bodies at the Base of Geronimo

Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady has her hands full. She's pregnant with her third child. A re-election campaign is looming. Her daughter Jenny is preparing to leave for college. And she's still grieving the sudden, violent deaths of her mother Eleanor and stepfather George Winfield - not in a car accident, but at the hands of a freeway sniper who shot at their RV while they were driving home to Bisbee from Minnesota. George died at the scene. Eleanor was airlifted to a Phoenix hospital and died there. It's the kind of loss that reshapes a person's relationship with safety, with routine, with the assumption that the people you love will come home - and Joanna is carrying all of it when two women are found dead at the base of Geronimo, a limestone peak near Bisbee that locals know well.

Did they jump? Were they pushed? Were two suicides really a coincidence? And why were two women with seemingly nothing in common found together at the bottom of the same cliff? This is the seventeenth book in J.A. Jance's Joanna Brady series, and it finds the Arizona sheriff navigating both professional crisis and personal upheaval. The case that lands on her desk is puzzling from the first hour - and the deeper she digs, the darker the truth beneath it becomes.

Two Victims, No Apparent Connection

The first victim is quickly identified as Desirée Wilburton, a University of Arizona graduate student and teaching assistant working toward her PhD in microbiology, who had been studying cacti in the area. She's young, brilliant, and has no obvious enemies. The second is Susan Marie Nelson, a high school teacher and debate coach at a school in Sierra Vista, married to Drexel Nelson, a local preacher. When Joanna personally delivers the news of Susan's death to Drexel, his reaction stops her cold - he displays no grief whatsoever. Not shock, not denial, not the numb blankness of someone who hasn't processed the words yet. Just nothing. That's the first red flag. There will be many more.

The investigation takes a disturbing turn when Joanna's team begins examining Susan Nelson's teaching career and discovers she wasn't the wholesome minister's wife the community believed her to be. Susan was a serial predator - a teacher who had sexual relationships with her students, committing statutory rape under the guise of mentorship and authority. The revelation is made worse by the fact that one of the young men connected to Susan turns out to be the son of one of Joanna's own deputies, bringing the case uncomfortably close to home and forcing Joanna to navigate the investigation while protecting the integrity of her own department.

The connection between Desirée Wilburton and Susan Nelson - two women from different worlds, different ages, different circumstances - is the mystery's central puzzle, and Jance builds it carefully, releasing information at a pace that keeps the reader working alongside Joanna without getting ahead of her. What J.A. Jance herself has described as the book's core theme - "the corrosive and potentially fatal power of family secrets" - drives both victims' stories toward a convergence that's more disturbing than either death suggested individually.

The Weight Joanna Carries

Jance has always been good at layering personal and professional pressure, and Downfall piles on more than most entries in the series. The pregnancy makes the physical demands of the job harder - Joanna is chasing leads and managing a department while her body is doing something else entirely. Her grief over losing her mother and stepfather is still raw, complicated by the fact that her relationship with Eleanor was never simple. The re-election campaign requires political performance that Joanna has never been comfortable with. And Marliss Shackleford - the relentless columnist for the local Bisbee Bee, whose "Bisbee Buzzings" column has been a thorn in Joanna's side for multiple books - needles her constantly about the unsolved case, adding public pressure to the private burden.

Chief Deputy Tom Hadlock, who has been struggling since his appointment in earlier books, must step up when circumstances demand it - and watching him rise to the occasion is one of the book's quieter satisfactions. Hadlock's growth from uncertain appointee to competent leader mirrors the series' broader interest in how people change under pressure: sometimes they break, and sometimes they discover capabilities they didn't know they had. FBI Agent Robin Watkins arrives to assist with the investigation, adding federal resources and a fresh perspective that Jance uses to inject new energy into a long-running series. Multiple reviewers have expressed hope that Watkins will become a recurring character, which speaks to how effectively she's drawn in a single book.

Bisbee, the Desert, and Secrets That Don't Stay Buried

The Cochise County setting remains as vivid and integral as it's been across seventeen books. Jance writes the Arizona desert and the small-town dynamics of Bisbee with the authority of someone who knows the place from the inside - the heat, the landscape, the mining-town history, the tight-knit community where gossip travels faster than official communication and where everyone's business is everyone else's concern. Geronimo Peak isn't just a crime scene location. It's a landmark that residents recognize, that hikers climb on weekends, that children learn to navigate growing up. Setting the deaths there makes them feel immediate and local in a way that an anonymous cliff wouldn't achieve.

The small-town setting also amplifies the revelation about Susan Nelson. In a city, a teacher's double life might remain hidden indefinitely. In Bisbee, secrets don't stay buried - they leak through church congregations, parent-teacher conferences, whispered conversations at the grocery store. The investigation doesn't just uncover Susan's crimes. It forces the community to confront how many people suspected something and said nothing, how the facade of the preacher's wife provided cover that a less respectable woman would never have received.

Seventeen Books In

Not every seventeenth book in a series maintains quality. Long-running detective series often coast on familiarity by this point, going through the motions with interchangeable plots and characters whose development plateaued a decade ago. Downfall doesn't coast. The mystery is well-constructed, with a final-quarter twist that reveals the killer in a genuinely surprising fashion. The dark subject matter - sexual abuse of minors by an authority figure, institutional silence, family secrets that enable predators - is handled with the seriousness it demands without becoming exploitative.

The book's limitations are characteristic of the series at this stage. The first half includes extensive backstory recapping - necessary for readers coming in at book seventeen, but a drag for longtime fans who already know Joanna's history, her department's dynamics, and her complicated relationship with her late mother. Jance's prose occasionally leans on clichés and verbal tics, and some readers have found her dialogue overwrought in places - one critic noted that law enforcement characters sometimes "sounded like hyperbolic hillbillies," which is harsh but not entirely unfair. The climactic sequence involves a dangerous confrontation between Joanna and the killer that edges toward melodrama, though Jance pulls it back before it tips over.

These are the flaws of a seventeenth installment, not of a bad book. Joanna Brady remains a character worth following - competent, principled, navigating motherhood and law enforcement and grief with a stubbornness that feels earned rather than performed. Jance's commitment to tackling genuinely disturbing crimes within the framework of a genre that often sanitizes its darkest material is what keeps this series relevant, and Downfall is one of its stronger recent entries.

Rating: 4.0/5 ⭐

Perfect for: Fans of the Joanna Brady series, readers who enjoy female law enforcement protagonists in richly drawn settings, anyone who appreciates well-crafted mysteries that don't flinch from dark subject matter.

Skip if: You prefer starting long series from the beginning, the first-half backstory recapping tests your patience, or content involving sexual abuse of minors is too difficult.