First, before I say anything about the book itself, I want to spend a paragraph commenting on the Premium Plus book size that a few of the book publishers are beginning to use. HarperCollins and its imprint Avon Books are testing it, starting with Long Time Gone. I have two conflicting desires here. I like reading this format a bit better than the regular mass market paperback size. Not because the type is easier to read, though the book claims that. It’s because the slightly larger size makes it easier to hold the book and keep the pages open. It’s one of the things I love about trade paperbacks. The conflict is storage. I really wish all my books were the same size, or at least that they were of a limited number of sizes. It would make storage fairly simple to have one hardback size, one trade paperback size, and one mass market paperback size. I cannot double-shelve my hardbacks and trade paperbacks because of the varying sizes for those formats, but I can for mass market paperbacks. These new premium plus books mess that up. Not so much that I can’t double shelve them, but if I were stacking them on their sides, it would. It makes packing books a pain. So while I like the readability, I implore publishers to pick some standard sizes and stick to them.
Long Time Gone is the 17th J. P. Beaumont mystery from J. A. Jance. They generally aren’t great writing, but they are fun, particularly for me since the series is set in Seattle. Luckily, Jance is slowly getting better as a writer, and she seems to be using the standard police procedural clichés a lot less as she writes more books. For instance, in this book, Beaumont breaks rules on occasion, but he isn’t profligate in doing so. Presented with an opportunity to rescue a hostage, he doesn’t go in alone because he can’t wait for back up. Granted, he doesn’t follow the book like he’s supposed to, but he at least calls in several other police officers (who also tell him this isn’t the best idea) to help. And rather than build a subplot about Beaumont knowing information that implicates his former partner but not telling, he does the right thing. He tells his partner’s lawyer about it, and then says he’s immediately telling the investigating officer. And then he does so.
Now, the murders in the Beaumont novels generally hit too close to the characters’ personal lives just a bit too frequently. And Jance often breaks the 4th wall, so to speak. Beaumont will stop relating his story and drop into an explanation of something tangentially related. For instance, he’ll break off to explain the history of the Doghouse restaurant. Or a bit on the history of the U-District. I wish Jance would find better ways to relate the background.
Now, the plot of Long Time Gone seems to be picking up on the recent television series about cold cases and the end of the book seems to indicate that Beaumont would be going into private practice solving cold cases in subsequent books. A nun recovers memories from 40 years earlier where she witnessed a murder as a child. Turns out the murder is still unsolved, and so Beaumont is assigned the case. The nun can identify the murderers, one of whom is still alive, but with that much time Beaumont has to prove the case using other evidence. As he begins to close in on that evidence, the rich and powerful who don’t want the case solved begin to flex their muscles. So not only does Beaumont have to solve the case but he has to solve the cover-up as well.
The second plot involves Ron Peters, Beaumont’s paraplegic former partner. His ex-wife is found murdered in Tacoma. Since the Brame case, in the Beaumont world all such cases involving murders of police spouses are investigated by a state homicide squad. The squad for which Beaumont works. He can’t work on that case because Peters is his ex-partner, but he stays involved enough, feeding information and theories to both Peters and the investigators. Early on, Peters is implicated, and so Beaumont has to find the real killer, even if it’s his friend and former partner.
The Peters subplot was fairly obvious. I had the real bad guys pegged pretty early. Which I think Jance recognized so she wrote up the hostage taking to give the subplot some oomph. The main crime regarding the murder witnessed by the nun seems to be modelled after the Bullitt family, though there’s obviously the difference that none of the Bullitts ever committed a murder. For the most part, the characters act in normal ways. My one beef with this one is that several rich people who stand to lose some social status when the 40 year old murder is solved take extremely drastic measures (murdering witnesses for instance) that would never in a million years prevent the truth from eventually coming out. Smart people should recognize that. Rather than committing more murders to cover it up, I would have embezzled the remaining funds I controlled and left the country. I’ll spoil the plot a bit here. Prior to murdering witnesses, the folks doing the cover-up haven’t committed any crimes. They’d just lose control of a non-profit foundation founded by one of the murderers. So take the money from the foundation before it goes belly-up and abscond. It has a hell of a lot better chance of succeeding than what they did do. I really do like the grunt work that Beaumont uses to solve the cases. There’s no real C.S.I. type stuff here. I mean, there’s a little bit, but it’s totally believable. Mostly Beaumont solves the cases by interviewing people and going through records. Much more mundane than using surveillance or C.S.I. magic, though much less dramatic. It makes for a better story of putting the pieces together though.
Title: Long time gone
Author: J. A. Jance (Judith A. Jance)
Series: J. P. Beaumont ; 17
Imprint / publisher: Avon / HarperCollins
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 417 p.
Publication date: July 2006
ISBN-10: 0-380-72435-9
Subject: Beaumont, J. P. (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Police — Washington (State) — Seattle — Fiction
Subject: Seattle (Wash.) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3560.A44 L66 2005
