Damage Control is a Terrible Book

On the lookout for some mindless escape, this book’s desert inspired cover caught my eye at the store one day, so I took a look at the summary on the back. It’s a crime novel set in a small Arizona town where a bag with human remains is discovered after a rainstorm. Dostoevsky it ain’t, but it sounds engaging enough to provide a brief respite from the torments of daily life.

So much for that. Let me say this bluntly, J.A. Jance is a hack and Damage Control is easily one of the worst books I’ve ever read.

The fact that this woman is a “bestselling author” is a sad commentary on the state of American publishing. The average high school student could write a better work of fiction than this drivel. Basic principles of story telling are ignored and the author just continually heaps more and more meaningless tripe in there to try and fool the reader into thinking there is something worth reading here.

You want specifics? OK.

I’ll start by pointing out the obvious. “Sheriff Joanna Brady is busy” is not a plot.

Among the items Jance puts on the Sheriff’s plate are two suicidal old people, a dead body in a bag, feuding sisters, a suspicious fire, a slumlord, a missing child with a whore mother, poison chocolate sauce, a cheating father, a cheating ex-husband, a difficult mother, missing developmentally disabled people, developmentally disabled people possibly having sex, a rental property, a teenager, an infant, a nosey reporter, departing staff, a dead deputy, an FBI investigation into her personal finances, and a husband preparing to depart on a book tour.

It’s all just another day in the life of Sheriff Brady!

It’s also an incoherent mess Mr. Schag would have handed back to me covered in red ink and a big fat F if I had written it when I was 15.

Jance doesn’t even try to link it all together in a compelling way. The book is supposed to be a “suspense” novel. The two main plot lines are the old people who commit suicide and the dead body discovered in the desert. If you were writing a suspense novel, which one would you focus on? Probably not the old people, right? Right? Bueller?

The suspicious body in the desert is ignored for ages and gets wrapped up quickly only near the end of the book where it appears Jance was coming up on her page count. Hundreds of pages are spent on the old couple and their feuding daughters with the big break in the case coming thanks to chocolate sauce. This sounds more like a twist that fell on M. Night Shyamalan’s cutting room floor than a break in a real criminal case.

About a hundred pages in I realized I didn’t care what was happening, but boredom and the hope that it would get better kept me going. Somewhere around the midpoint I quit hoping and just decided to slog it out to bring you this scathing review and warning:

Never, ever read Damage Control or any other “suspense” novel by J. A. Jance.