J. A. Jance

Bisbee, the copper town in southeastern Arizona where J. A. Jance grew up, still supplies the ground for her Joanna Brady books about a Cochise County sheriff. Jance, born in South Dakota in 1944, took a degree in English and secondary education in 1966 and a master's in library science four years later, taught at Pueblo High School in Tucson, then spent five years as a school librarian in Sells. She began writing in March 1982 in the hours before a job selling life insurance, and published Until Proven Guilty, introducing the Seattle detective J. P. Beaumont, in 1985. The initials on the cover were a publisher's idea, on the argument that readers would not buy a male detective from a woman. Edge of Evil started a fourth series in 2006, built around Ali Reynolds, a television news anchor dropped for a younger face who goes home to Sedona; Credible Threat, the fifteenth Ali Reynolds novel, arrived in 2020. She divides her year between Seattle and Tucson.