Listening to Taking the Fifth by J. A. Jance

J. A. Jance. Taking the Fifth. Read by Gene Engene. Spokane, WA: Books in Motion, 1993.

The longer we live, the more we learn. From my library catalog listing, I have learned that J. A. Jance's first name is Judith. The first of her main characters I came across, the heroine of Shoot/Don't Shoot, is named Joanna Brady. The protagonist of the last two Jance novels I've heard is J. P. Beaumont.

J. P. Beaumont, "My friends call me Beau," is a homicide detective on the Seattle police force. I was born in Seattle, and, though I haven't spent a lot of time there, I find that I enjoy running across familiar placenames. This novel starts with a murder near the Pike Place Market. It alludes to Queen Anne Hill, Bellevue, and Boeing Field. If you're not from Seattle, or don't know the place, it provides some of the value of a travel book along with your murder mystery.

This is the fourth of J. A. Jance's J. P. Beaumont series, but it's obvious that Beau has led an active life. He lives in a penthouse condominium purchased with an inheritance from his second wife. He drives a Porsche 928 which he somehow acquired from a woman featured in a previous book. (Gene Engene, who reads the book for Books in Motion, pronounces that "porsh," as a drunk might say "porch." We cognoscenti know that it is "por-shuh," after the late, great designer of the Volkswagen and the Tiger tank.) His partner is hospitalized, recovering from an accident suffering (one supposes) in the previous book. And Beau drinks McNaughton's whiskey, which, I happen to know, is going to get him in trouble later.

Based on this book and Failure to Appear I'd say that Ms. Jance has an interest in the theater. In this case, the first victim is a stagehand at the Fifth Avenue Theater in Seattle. When the stagehand's roommate also turns up dead, Beau starts to suspect something. While checking out the theater, he arranges a dinner date with the star, Jasmine Day. He's impressed by her stage costume of long, blond hair, a cobalt blue dress, and matching Cole Haan shoes. So impressed that he ends up taking her home with him. Then he finds a witness who says that the murder was committed by a woman with long, blond hair, a long dress, and blue stiletto-heeled shoes. Uh-oh!

Taking the Fifth develops into a tale of disguise and deception, involving huge shipments of cocaine, a DEA agent with enough money to fly his own plane, and Beau nearly having his head knocked off by his lady friend. The scene in which Beau is on one end of a telephone line, with a terrified woman whose house is being invaded on the other end, is quite effective. This is, like most mystery novels, popcorn fiction. Or, one might say, Chinese dinner fiction: an hour after reading it you're hungry again. But Beau Beaumont is a reasonably appealing character, and the plot has enough twists and turns to hold one's interest.