Jane Perry is a woman with issues. She left the Denver Homicide department with the strong feeling that she was a total failure. Even though she had recently solved a particularly nasty homicide and appeared on the “Larry King Show” live as the heroine of the day. The problem was that she was an alcoholic and spiraling down fast. Her rough childhood during which she received regular beatings from her alcoholic police sergeant father left her with bitterness and no love for anyone including herself. You would certainly see Jane as “self-destructive”.
Her Denver police boss could not get Jane to stay with the Denver PD and even though Jane has great respect for him she would not return his calls. Jane was determined to make it on her own in her private detective agency. She felt that she did not need anyone. In addition to striking out on her own, Jane regularly attended AA meetings to stay off the alcohol.
At one of her AA meetings Jane meets an old lady who is sitting on the steps out front in the rain. Katherine “Kit” wants to hire Jane to go with her out to California to try to find a 12 year old girl (Charlotte) who had been kidnapped. The kidnapping she felt was a duplication of the kidnapping and murder of her niece fourteen years earlier. The old woman is a new age fanatic devoted to herbal remedies for everything that ails you including her own cancer. Jane is skeptical and not anxious to take on this weird lady but recent events had led Jane to be sort of desperate to get some cash flowing in her detective agency.
Jane is led to an extreme fundamentalist religious fanatic who has defended and protected the young man that the old lady is convinced murdered her niece. They get to California and rent a room in a cheap hotel and Kit hauls out all her new age books and herbal remedies and settles in. Jane proceeds to get out on her own (rejecting Kit’s efforts to help) and run down clues.
When Jane does her solid police investigating of everyone’s backgrounds she finds that there are some things that Kit has not revealed about her past. Jane is angry and Kit and very suspicious of being “Played” by Kit. She becomes pretty antagonistic toward Kit and we readers begin to think Kit may not be the nice old lady we thought she was.
The story ends with an extremely warm and good feeling climax. When Jane gets back to Denver she is ready to get back to her work with Denver Homicide with her old boss. We can look forward to more wonderful adventures with Jane in the future. At least a reader can hope for more. This is a fine story and is well told. I give it a 9 of 10 on the Weaver meter.
