Lena Jones Mystery

Things are never easy for Scottsdale private eye Lena Jones. Her partner in Desert Investigations, Jimmy Sisiwan, is leaving for a moneyed wife and a job at Southwest Microsystems, and her old captain at the Scottsdale Police Department is off to his home in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, she's doing security for Warren Quinn, director of a documentary film about the American World War II camp for German POWs at Arizona's Papago Park, from which some prisoners once escaped. One surviving escapee, Käpitan zur See Erik Ernst, a man now in his nineties and confined to a wheelchair after a boating accident, has just been murdered. What's more, the man's Ethiopian caregiver begs Lena to clear him as a suspect in the murder. Lena, experienced in probing the past for answers to the central mystery of her own life-who is she?-learns that after their daring Christmas Eve escape Ernst and two other POWs had hid out in Arizona's rugged Superstition Mountains. Nearby on Christmas night, a farm family, the Bollingers, had been slaughtered. A jury didn't convict the only survivor, the teenage son, despite some suggestive evidence. What might Chess Bollinger know about Ernst-and vice versa? And how much can Lena trust filmmaker Warren Quinn, either as a client, a witness, or a lover? In this complex, stunning case based on real Arizona history, Betty Webb spins another evocative, haunting story in her Lena Jones mystery series.

Arizona is still a wicked frontier. While scouting locations for a film documentary on Arizona's Apache Wars, private investigator Lena Jones and Oscar-winning director Warren Quinn discover the mutilated body of a young girl. The gruesome manner of the child's death evokes memories of Lena's own rough childhood. Clashing with the local law, Lena's investigation uncovers a small town with a big secret, for Los Perdidos is not the Eden it first appears to be. Founded by the descendants of pioneers who fought Geronimo, the townspeople have now armed themselves against the hordes of illegal immigrants streaming across the Arizona-Mexico border. A significant population of documented foreign-born residents also lives and works in Los Perdedos at a modern plant. Lena senses a sinister force at work in the town-but where? Then two more girls disappear from Los Perdidos, and as the death toll mounts, Lena is tempted to implement some frontier justice of her own. When she finally unmasks the killer, she discovers a chain of horrific crimes responsible for subjugating millions of girls and women around the globe. In Desert Cut, the still vivid memory of Geronimo's war mixes with the modern immigration war, the hard life on the Arizona-Mexico border contrasts with Hollywood's slick production meetings, and the cruelty of an ancient practice is tempered by a growing underground railroad fighting to save its young victims.

While running surveillance in an industrial section of Scottsdale, Arizona, PI Lena Jones discovers the body of a woman connected to the infamous polygamy cult Second Zion. Lena joins forces with a former polygamist "sister wife" to find the victim's killer and discovers a shocking secret: that in a society where one man can have ten wives, nine men will have none. Second Zion makes certain these possible rivals don't stick around. In the midst of Lena's search for the dead woman's lost son, memories from her own damaged childhood surface when she is surprised by a visit from her beloved foster mother, whom she'd been forcibly parted from at the age of nine. The reunion is interrupted when Lena learns that a friend in Hollywood is being stalked by a mental patient. Lena flies to her aid, only to find that danger has followed her.

PI Lena Jones learns that old sins never die; they're still taking lives. When PI Lena Jones' partner, Pima Indian Jimmy Sisiwan, is arrested in the remote town of Walapai Flats in northern Arizona, Lena closes the Desert Investigations office and rushes to his aid. What she finds is a town up in arms over a new uranium mine located only ten miles from the magnificent Grand Canyon. Jimmy's sister-in-law, founder of Victims of Uranium Mining, has been murdered, but the opposing side has taken hits, too. Ike Donohue, the mine's public relations man, is found shot to death, which casts suspicion on Jimmy and his entire family. During her investigation, Lena finds not only a community decimated by dangerous mining practices but also a connection to actor John Wayne and the mysterious deaths resulting from the 1953 filming of The Conqueror. Gabe Boone, a wrangler on that doomed film, is still alive, but the only person the aged man will confide in is John Wayne's ghost. It's up to Lena to penetrate Gabe's defenses and uncover the decades-old tragedy that no one in Walapai Flats wants to talk about. By delving into the area's history, Lena discovers the reason that high-ranking government officials want those crimes to remain under wraps. Desert Wind, like the others in Betty Webb's Lena Jones mystery series, is based on the facts of true-crime cases.

Ferociously ambitious US senatorial candidate Juliana Thorsson has been keeping a secret. The horrific slaughter of a prominent doctor, his wife, and their ten-year-old son inside their Scottsdale home brings Thorsson to private investigator Lena Jones. The slain family's fourteen-year-old, Alison, and her boyfriend, Kyle, have confessed to the murders. Thorsson wants to hire Lena to discover if Alison is telling the truth, but before accepting the job, Lena demands to know why a rising political star wants to involve herself with the fate of a girl she's never met. Desperate for Lena's help, Thorsson reveals her explosive secret-that Alison is the candidate's biological daughter, a fact she's kept hidden for years. But that's not all. Thorsson then confides something even more unusual than a mere hidden pregnancy-something that could ruin her political plans forever. Suspecting that Alison's parents had secrets of their own that could have led to the murders, Lena finally accepts Thorsson's assignment. But interviewing those who knew the family well soon puts Lena-now a strong defender of the two teens-in danger of her life. Fast paced, probing, and filled with the trademark twists of the Lena Jones series, Desert Rage once again displays that Betty Webb is unsparing of her characters yet writes their stories with wit and compassion.

When the man who raped Scottsdale private investigator Lena Jones when she was a nine-year-old foster child is released from prison, Lena is waiting for him in the parking lot-with a big knife. "Papa" Brian Wycoff survives their meeting, but the next day, his wife, who knew about his crimes but did nothing to stop him-in fact enabled him-is found dead in their Apache Junction home, shot through both eyes. Terrified he will be next, Wycoff violates his parole and flees north to the small town of Black Canyon City, taking shelter in an RV on his brother-in-law's small ranch. A couple of days later, he is found tortured to death, eight horizontal marks burned into his flesh. One for each of his victims - Suspicion first falls upon Lena, who has trailed Wycoff to Black Canyon City to make sure he doesn't come near any other children. When the local authorities arrive to question her, she admits to having been tempted to kill her former foster father but that someone beat her to the punch. Suspicion then falls on Wycoff's other victims, the now-grown men and women he abused when they were still in his care, and on the mothers of the children who went missing before his arrest. When Lena takes up the case, more to protect one of the mothers who has been arrested than to find the real killer, her conscience is torn. Does a serial child rapist, a pedophile also implicated in the disappearance of several children, really deserve justice? That choice might not be left up to Lena when members of a local group, Parents of Missing Children, start working to prevent her investigation from succeeding. How far will they go to make sure she fails?