{"id":1012,"date":"2015-09-04T06:00:26","date_gmt":"2015-09-04T13:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1012"},"modified":"2015-09-03T18:33:32","modified_gmt":"2015-09-04T01:33:32","slug":"dance-of-the-bones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2015\/09\/04\/dance-of-the-bones\/","title":{"rendered":"Dance of the Bones"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Beau<\/a>Dance of the Bones goes on sale Tuesday, September 8, the day after Labor Day. For some of you, this will be the first Walker book you\u2019ve ever read. (I hope it won\u2019t be the last!)<\/span><\/p>\n

The first of this series, Hour of the Hunter, was my first non-Beaumont book. When it came out, many dyed-in-the wool Beaumont fans were less than thrilled and more than a few wrote to let me know they were displeased. I turned some of those folks around by explaining how a former professor of Creative Writing from the University of Arizona ended up being the crazed killer in that book. \u00a0It\u2019s a good story. Those of you who are regular readers of my blog have probably already heard it, so I won\u2019t repeat that oft-told tale here.<\/span><\/p>\n

The point is, if you\u2019re a Walker newbie or a Walker oldie, you\u2019ll be entering the world of the Tohono O\u2019odham, the Desert People, who have lived in the desert west of what they called Chuk Shon (Tucson) for thousands of years. You\u2019ll also meet a cast of T.O. characters stretching from the 1880s to the present\u2014Understanding Woman, Rita Antone, Looks at Nothing, Fat Crack Ortiz, Lani Walker, and Dan Pardee\u2014as well as Understanding Woman\u2019s great, great, great grandson, a surly teenager named Gabe Ortiz. \u00a0\u00a0Many of those characters have been dead for decades at the time this book takes place, but you’ll find that their wit, wisdom, and stories live on.<\/span><\/p>\n

By now you\u2019re probably thinking, is she nuts? I thought this was supposed to be a murder mystery, and isn\u2019t J.P. Beaumont supposed to be in this book? It is, and he is. Beau and Brandon Walker team up to solve two far flung and long cold homicides, even though Beau is as much a stranger to all these folks as new readers will be. But you know what? I\u2019m not worried about that.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1970 I went to Sells, Arizona, for the first time as the newly hired librarian at Indian Oasis School. The road through the reservation from our house was mostly flat desert, but just before entering Sells, the road crosses series of hills through a low-lying pass. \u00a0As I\u00a0drove down into town that day and smelled wood smoke from cooking fires lingering in the air, I felt like a complete outsider, but over the next five years, that changed. Melissa Juan, Pauline Hendricks, Rita Pablo, and Loretta Ramon took me in and made me part of their circle\u2014a circle I still treasure to this day.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s my purpose in writing these books. Yes, I want to tell a story. In the earlier books, you see how Diana Ladd and Brandon Walker are\u00a0brought into the T.O. circle, and I\u2019m confident J.P. Beaumont and my readers will be welcomed in the same way.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you come to one of the Dance of the Bones events, you\u2019ll no doubt hear some of my reservation \u201ccircle\u201d stories. I will not, however, be telling any of the T.O. legends that appear in the backgrounds of all the Walker books. Those are considered \u2018winter-telling tales’ and can only be told between the middle of November and the middle of March. \u00a0Since DOTB is a September book, telling those stories is off-limits.<\/span><\/p>\n

The schedule is up on my website, www.jajance.com<\/a>.<\/span> \u00a0Go to the map and click on your state for detailed information about appearances. And if you want to read more about the <\/span>Walker Series,<\/a> just read about it on my website too. \u00a0See you on the road.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now I\u2019d better go pack.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dance of the Bones goes on sale Tuesday, September 8, the day after Labor Day. For some of you, this will be the first Walker book you\u2019ve ever read. (I hope it won\u2019t be the last!) The first of this series, Hour of the Hunter, was my first non-Beaumont book. When it came out, many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33,127,6,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-tohono-oodham","category-tour-2","category-walker"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-gk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1012"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1014,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012\/revisions\/1014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}