When I moved to Seattle in the early eighties, it was called the Emerald City, and it was lovely. I lived in two separate condo buildings on Second Avenue at the north end of the Denny Regrade and worked downtown in an office building at Sixth and Stewart, a little more than a mile away.
At the time, the neighborhood was pleasant and safe with wide tree-lined avenues and smoothly moving traffic. There were a few dodgy taverns on First Avenue, a few blocks away from our buildings, but that was it. My kids, in grade school at the time, could and did walk two blocks to the Free Bus Zone to catch a ride downtown and meet me at my office. The bus let them off at Third and Stewart, and they walked the rest of the way. Back then downtown was filled with shops, large and small, bustling hotels, and restaurants doing a booming business.
The early Beaumont books reflect how the neighborhood was back then. Alas it is no more. Between bus lanes and bicycle lanes, the wide avenues have been pared down to two, leaving traffic snarled much of the time. Once clean sidewalks have been taken over by homeless encampments. Retailers plagued by shoplifting and outright robberies have abandoned the neighborhood en masse, leaving behind boarded up windows and doors. As for the corner of Third and Pine? What was once a retail Mecca, has turned into such a shooting gallery that it could easily be renamed the OK Corral, with reports of overnight shootings occurring in the area almost on a daily basis.
When I began writing about J.P. Beaumont some forty years ago, I made the conscious decision to have him age in place, and he has done that over the course of many years and many books. Den of Iniquity weighs in as Beaumont # 26, and because setting is as much a presence in my books as the actual characters are, while Beau has been aging, so has his home in downtown Seattle.
In the eighties graffiti was considered to be a major problem. Now fentanyl is. Day after day, that deadly but ubiquitous drug is killing people, many of them unhoused. Many of the people living in those encampments under freeways and bridges, in parks, and along city streets are there due to addictions caused by the plague of illegal drugs that continue to flood our country. Between feeding their addictions or keeping a roof over their heads, many of those folks vote for drugs and take to the streets.
Seattle’s homeless problem played a major role in an earlier Beaumont, Sins of the Fathers, and now it’s back with a vengeance in Den of Iniquity.
Shootings in downtown Seattle have become so commonplace, that after seeing the headline, I seldom bother reading the article. The thought that usually goes through my mind is, “Oh, well, it’s probably just a couple of drug dealers duking it out.” Many of us also do the same thing when we read that a suspicious death is drug-related. We think, “Overdose, so what?” and shrug it off. Sadly, as a society, we’ve become inured to all these things, just as we have become accustomed to ignoring people found sleeping in doorways and on sidewalks. We look away and don’t even see them, and I suspect that all too often law enforcement does the same.
But what we fail to remember as we ignore them is that all those people are people, too. They once had hopes and dreams, and most of them still have family members who have always loved them and miss them, too. And those folks need justice for losing their loved ones just as much as anyone else.
That’s what Beau discovers in the course of this story. By listening to overdoses victims’ grieving relatives and impassioned loved ones—including a devastated but determined grandmother—he learns how some of those once promising individuals lost their way and ended up living on the streets. He also learns that far too often, some of those suspicious homeless deaths that have been written off as accidental overdoses aren’t accidental at all. They’re really out and out murder.
In the process of tracking down and dealing with all those grieving folks and learning more about their lost loved ones, J.P. Beaumont turns into a better human being. He ends up caring about all of them. And even though these are characters I made up, in thinking and writing about them, I believe creating this book made me a better person, too.
Tony Hillerman once told me, “Literary fiction is where nothing much happens to people you don’t like very much.” As a proud practitioner of the art of “genre fiction,” I believe I’ve created a cast of characters here that my readers will be surprised to find themselves liking and caring about, too.
After reading Den of Iniquity, the next time some of my readers walk past a little old lady, wrapped in a blanket and sleeping on the street, maybe they’ll look at her in a whole new light. Is she what she appears to be—an impoverished individual with nowhere else to go getting her zzs, or is she a deadly serial killer lying in wait for her next victim?
After reading this book, you may end up realizing that there’s no way to know for sure. It could go either way.
J.A. Jance is the New York Times best selling author of 46 contemporary mysteries in four different series.
A voracious reader, J. A. Jance knew she wanted to be a writer from the moment she read her first Wizard of Oz book in second grade. Always drawn to mysteries, from Nancy Drew right through John D. McDonald’s Travis Magee series, it was only natural that when she tried her hand at writing her first book, it would be a mystery as well.
J. A. Jance went on to become the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family, and Edge of Evil. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.
Jance is an avid crusader for many causes, including the American Cancer Society, Gilda’s Club, the Humane Society, the YMCA, and the Girl Scouts. A lover of animals, she has a rescued Dachshund named Bella.
