{"id":2283,"date":"2021-03-05T06:00:03","date_gmt":"2021-03-05T14:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=2283"},"modified":"2021-03-03T11:04:36","modified_gmt":"2021-03-03T19:04:36","slug":"tales-from-the-missing-and-endangered-trail-the-tucson-festival-of-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2021\/03\/05\/tales-from-the-missing-and-endangered-trail-the-tucson-festival-of-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Tales from the Missing and Endangered Trail–The Tucson Festival of Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

First the good news. No, wait\u2014make that the excellent news. All of my early-and-often book reading fans turned up the spin cycle for that long ago Creative Writing professor as well as my first husband. Missing and Endangered debuted at #10 on the NY Times<\/em> Bestseller Hardback last and #6 on The NY Times<\/em> Combined hardback and e-book list. Yay!!! Thank you so very much. I really appreciate it.<\/p>\n

And thank you to those who wrote to me expressing their condolences after last week\u2019s tribute to Rusty and Kathy Miller. By now those of you who have finished the book have met my fictionalized version of Rusty in Missing and Endangered.<\/p>\n

And now it\u2019s time to turn our attention to the Tucson Festival of Books. No, I\u2019m not in Tucson where, I have it on good authority, it\u2019s sunny, dry, and warm, as opposed to Seattle where it’s dreary, damp, overcast, and cold. In Tucson by now, there are probably hints of orange blossoms in the air. At the moment, nothing at all is blooming here in the Pacific Northwest. So yes, I\u2019m missing Tucson right now\u2014a lot, and the festival is all virtual this time around.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m scheduled to do two TFOB sessions, one with Joe Kenda on Saturday and another with Lisa Gardner on Sunday. Since the blog doesn\u2019t go out until Friday morning, it may be that some sessions will already be completely booked. Not to worry. I\u2019ve been told that an hour or so after live events are over, they should be viewable to those interested by using the same links.<\/p>\n

Links to TFOB sessions:<\/p>\n

Murder in Fact and Fiction: Saturday March 6, 1-2 pm (MST)<\/a><\/p>\n

Strong Female Protagonists: Sunday March 7, 11:00 – 12:00 pm (MST)<\/a><\/p>\n

And now for a little background. It wasn\u2019t until I was writing the third Beaumont book, Trial by Fury, that someone from New York mentioned that I was writing police procedurals. This was big news for me. Right up to that moment I thought I\u2019d been writing books! The words \u201cpolice procedural\u201d were very scary. After all, I had never been in law enforcement. I had been a school librarian. As such, I had learned a lot about doing research, and in writing my books, I relied on that skill to sort out as much as I could about \u2026 well \u2026 police procedures.<\/p>\n

Over time, part of that research included watching a good deal of what\u2019s called \u201ccrime TV,\u201d starting with endless episodes of Forensic Files. Later, when ID-Discovery came along, I began watching programs on that as well. Those often allowed me to view tapes of real detective\/offender jailhouse interviews as well as reenactments of the accompanying homicides. By watching those, I learned how cops go about narrowing down the list of suspects\u2014starting from the inside out; how they use surveillance video to identify suspects; how they track electronic devices to sort out locations of both victims and suspects; and how DNA can be used decades later to solve long cold cases. Note to possible crooks: Do NOT go to Walmart either before or after committing a crime. Their video surveillance systems capture criminals every day. In one case, a murder victim\u2019s Fitbit revealed exactly when she died and, as a result, blew her killer husband\u2019s alibi out of the water.<\/p>\n

And it was in watching those programs that I became aware of Joe Kenda\u2019s Homicide Hunter. Joe worked homicide for the Colorado Springs police department for twenty years and solved over 300 homicides. His show, still in reruns on ID-Discovery, ran for nine seasons. It\u2019s a reenactment show with someone else playing his character on screen while Joe does the narration with his plain-spoken dry wit providing valuable insight into what\u2019s going on. He now has a new show, American Detective streaming on Discovery+. He\u2019s also written two books\u2014I Will Find You and his new one, Killer Triggers.<\/p>\n

With all that being said, here\u2019s how the Joe Kenda\/J.A. Jance panel at the Tucson Festival of Books came into existence.<\/p>\n

More than two years ago, with Bill recovering from surgery, I did a solo excursion to do an event in Newport News, Virginia. The mic check was over and I was sitting on stage when a woman with short white hair came up to me carrying a paperback copy of Proof of Life. \u201cYou put my husband\u2019s name in this book,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

I was on the far side of the country from where I lived. I had no idea who she was or who her husband was either, for that matter. \u201cI did?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d she said, \u201cmy husband, Joe Kenda.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was utterly astonished. It was true, of course. I had put her husband\u2019s name in the book. In the aftermath of the shuttering of the Special Homicide Investigation Team, one of Beau\u2019s former coworkers asked him with more than a bit of sarcasm, \u201cWhat do you think you\u2019ll be, the next Joe Kenda?\u201d<\/p>\n

When I finally found my voice, I said, \u201cYou\u2019re married to Joe Kenda?!!!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,” she said, pointing, \u201che\u2019s right over there.\u201d<\/p>\n

And with my eyes bugging out of my head I replied. \u201cJoe Kenda is HERE?\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, he was. We had brief introduction and a photo op. After the event, he stopped by for a moment and said, \u201cYou\u2019re quite a storyteller.\u201d Well, it takes one to know one.<\/p>\n

Since then we\u2019ve become friends. While on their way to an Alaskan cruise, he and his wife, Kathy, stayed with Bill and me here in Seattle for several days. We all hit it off. It was great fun. When he was invited to come to the TFOB this year, I imagined the four of us would be in Tucson together, having fun in the sun and sniffing just a hint of orange blossoms on the evening air.<\/p>\n

We all know THAT didn\u2019t happen! Like so many other things, Covid blew that idea out of the water. Instead of being together, we\u2019ll be doing our panel from opposite ends of the country, but it will be two friends chatting together. I expect it will be fun for Joe and me, and I hope it\u2019ll be fun for everyone else as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First the good news. No, wait\u2014make that the excellent news. All of my early-and-often book reading fans turned up the spin cycle for that long ago Creative Writing professor as well as my first husband. Missing and Endangered debuted at #10 on the NY Times Bestseller Hardback last and #6 on The NY Times Combined […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-AP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283","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=2283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2284,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283\/revisions\/2284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}