In last week’s blog I mentioned I would be reading two of my books for the first time since they were published. Once I’m done with writing a book and doing all the editing, I’m just … well … done with it. And although I loved reading as a kid, I HATED doing book reports. For one thing, the teachers made it clear that they didn’t really approve of the books I read. The Bobbsey Twins never grabbed me. Dog books? Absolutely. Anybody remember Albert Payson Terhune? I loved Lad, a Dog and all his other books, too. Horse books: My Friend, Flicka; Frog, the Horse that Knew No Master; The Black Stallion. To say nothing of mysteries—Nancy Drew, the Hardy boys, and the Dana girls. Not only that, as far as my teachers were concerned, Zane Grey’s books with all their blanked-out curse worse were totally off limits!

This time, however, I’m actually looking forward to doing book reports. I said I was going to read both Downfall and Field of Bones, so yesterday and, since I’m a chronological kind of person, I started with Downfall, the earlier of the two books. In my years of telling Tohono O’odham stories on the reservation, I learned that stories must end where they begin. As a result, I was surprised and even a little intrigued to see that the killer is right there in plain sight in the first few pages of the book. This time around, I already knew he was the killer. I can tell you that when I was writing the story, I had NO idea. The whole question throughout the book was how he’d be identified and caught. That’s what I was looking for the whole time I was reading the story. What investigative tools would Joanna and her team use to unmask him?

Throughout the book, also from beginning to end, while dealing with a complex investigation, Joanna Brady is having to confront the untimely deaths of both her mother, Eleanor, and her stepfather, George Winfield. Yes, she’s having to make those difficult final arrangements, while carrying all the unresolved conflicts between her and her mother which will now never be put to rest.

Several times while reading the book, I was surprised to find my legs covered with goosebumps. If those parts of the story could cause that kind of reaction for me, the author, I’m pretty sure they did the same thing for my readers.

The central issue in this book is the sexual abuse of children. Having been the victim of sexual molestation as a child, I happen to know this is an all-too-common occurrence in far too many lives, and that’s one of the reasons it sometimes surfaces in my storylines. In this instance the victims—multiple victims—are teenaged boys. In those kinds of situations, girls are generally regarded as victims from the get-go. When the victims are male, however, they are often regarded as somehow being complicit in their own abuse. I think the story in Downfall makes that unfair dichotomy clear.

I liked seeing how, under Joanna’s leadership, her former jail commander, Tom Hadlock, has grown into his role as her chief deputy. Close to the end of the book, when he calls his team into the conference room to lay out the strategy for saving Joanna from a deranged killer, I kept thinking “stop the gabbing and get on with it.” But in actual fact that’s what real cops do when faced with hostage situations. They map out the approach and create perimeters to keep the suspect from escaping. And Tom’s well thought out approach pays off big time.

My characters have aged and changed over time. In this book, Joanna and Butch’s son, Dennis, is five years old, and she’s pregnant with their second child a girl named Sage, named after Joanna’s father’s favorite book, Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. In my opinion, what men and women do behind closed doors is none of my business and none of my readers’ business, either. I remember a woman who wrote to me asking if Joanna and Butch have a “totally platonic relationship.” I replied that since they had two kids together, I didn’t think so.

Fans do write to complain about things on occasion, and the ones I’ve received most often about Downfall have blasted me for all those environment-damaging helium balloons released during the course of Eleanor and George Winfield’s barbecue and celebration of life. Given that complaint history, I approached that part of the story with some apprehension, and there it was in black and white. As the grownups are putting together plans of the memorial barbecue, five-year old Dennis is listening in and asks his father, “Is there going to be a party for Grandma and Grandpa?” When Butch allows that’s true, Denny ask poses question number two: “Will there be balloons?” If you’re five years old, balloons and parties go hand in hand. Butch, looking down at his son remarks, “Of course, there’ll be balloons,” and indeed there are, lots colorful balloons floating magically upward toward a bright blue sky.

And now for a slight digression—a tangent, as Mrs. Medigovich, my high school English teacher would call it.

My son-in-law, Jon, first came into my life in the nineties when he was in his late twenties. At the time he had a different last name and was dealing with a melanoma prognosis in which he’d been given approximately five years to live. It wasn’t until the end of the wedding ceremony when the minister introduced the newly married couple as Mr. and Mrs. Jon Jance that’s I learned he had chosen to take our daughter’s last name. He outlasted that initial five-year prognosis by an extra four by participating in every melanoma protocol that came down the line. Those gave him four extra years of life. They also gave us our only grandson, Colt.

This week, on the night before what would have been Jon and my daughter’s 27th wedding anniversary, we watched an episode of High Speed Chase in which an officer was severely injured. At the end of the program, it was reported that he recovered from his injuries enough to return to work. Then, in 2020 he was diagnosed with melanoma but is now in remission. That’s something else that gave me goosebumps. Jon was Patient # 6 in a T-cell protocol that now means melanoma is no longer an automatic death sentence. Six years later, that retired officer is still alive due in part to someone he never knew, my son-in-law, Jon Jance.

Colt was nine months old when we lost Jon. For the first few years after his death, Colt and our daughter released balloons every year on Jon’s birthday. Sending them off into the sky was a way to connect a little boy with his daddy in heaven. And that’s the real origin of the balloon part of Downfall. Did I tell that story to any of my helium balloon harpies? I did not. Did I point out that the balloons in question were fictional balloons so no actual environment was harmed? I didn’t do that, either. Instead, I gave them my standard Melissa G. response.

“What?” You may be asking yourselves right now. “Who the hell is Melissa G. Did I just miss something?” No, but she’s another part of my balloon-harpy history. In the early 2000s, someone signing herself as Melissa G. sent me an ugly email, saying that my author photo was so ugly that she hoped when I went out in public I did so with a bag over my head so I wouldn’t frighten people.” Since the website says I respond to ALL emails, I responded to hers with the following: Thank you for writing. Your input is appreciated.” That’s it. That’s all I said, but it isn’t the end of the story. I was writing an Ali Reynolds book at the time, and when someone named Melissa G. sent that VERY SAME message to Ali in fiction, all of Ali’s fictional fan responded by lighting into her Melissa G. with both barrels! They said everything in fiction that I wanted to say in real life. As it turns out, I have a real fan named Melissa G. Whenever I sign a book for her, I always specify it’s to “Melissa G, the good one.”

In Mrs. Medigovich’s book, that wasn’t just a digression or a tangent—that was a full-scale rant. Now, however, with that out of the way, let’s go back to Downfall. Sometime in the last year or so, a reader wrote to tell me that he’d noticed how, in all my books, there’s always some touch of reconciliation at the end of the story.

In Joanna’s life, one of the major problems between her and her mother is the fact that Joanna’s dad, D.H. Lathrop, was dead and her mother, Eleanor, was not. In many families, the last parent standing is the one who has to take all the heat. He or she is the one telling the kid to take the garbage out or do the dishes or finish his/her homework while the deceased parent gets a free pass on all those day-to-day issues. Living parent bad. Dead parent good.

Joanna has grown up with a huge case of hero-worship for her dad and an unrelenting disdain for her mother. At the post-funeral barbecue she learns about many of the good works her mother did around town without ever mentioning them to anyone else, Joanna included. Over the years, Joanna has also become aware that her father wasn’t nearly as perfect as she always believed he was, including the fact that he’d conducted a long-term extramarital affair with his secretary at work, a woman named Mona. Shortly before D.H. Lathrop’s death, Eleanor had learned of the affair and told him he had to choose—Eleanor and Joanna or Mona. He chose Eleanor and Joanna.

Although Joanna herself didn’t become aware of any of this history until well after she was an adult, she now understands that while she and her mother were able to go on with their lives, Mona has spent the remainder of hers quietly grieving for the man she loved and lost. In the confusion of sorting out final funeral arrangements in Downfall, an extra cemetery space has been purchased, one next to the family plot. In a piece of amazing generosity, after the funeral, Joanna goes to visit Mona, offering her that space so she could be buried close to the man she loved. Mona accepts, saying it’s the kindest thing anyone has ever done for her. “There is one problem,” Joanna points out. “The space is on the far side of my mother, so you won’t be right next to my dad.” “That’s all right,” Mona replies. “Eleanor was always stood between your father and me, and that’s how she’ll be forever.”

That ironic piece of reconciliation really made me smile, and now I know exactly which character from Downfall will show up in the next Joanna book.

So endeth Book Report Numero Uno. Now on to Field of Bones.