It's a Mystery

As I've mentioned before, I'm a mysterious person--well, actually I said I'm a mystery person.  No matter what else I'm reading, I always have a mystery going, too.  Blame it on a misspent youth spent reading Nancy Drew.  Nancy was a sleuth, she was independent, she had her own sporty roadster, her hair was stylishly coiffed, though she sometimes wore a cloche.  I didn't know what half the words meant, but I was sure they were indications of how cool Nancy was.  I've been hooked on mysteries from that day forward.

J.A. Jance writes a mystery series featuring Joanne Brady as the sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona.  I picked up the fourth book in the series, Dead to Rights, from my library shelves because I was wanting to read a light mystery with familiar characters and scenarios that didn't feature soul-sucking Specters (as found in my most recent Once Upon a Time selection).  I just wasn't sure whether I had already read this book or not.  I read the first few pages of the book, and that still didn't help answer my question.  So, I just kept reading.

Sheriff Joanne Brady is a recently elected official; she ran for county sheriff after her husband, the previous sheriff, was murdered just months before.  Sheriff Brady is the single mother of a daughter, juggling a stressful and time-consuming job, her difficult mother, all the while trying to make it in a traditional male domain. 

In this book, a veterinarian is murdered and the list of suspects, as in all good mysteries, is long.  Initially Brady and her staff suspect a man whose wife was run down and killed by the vet the previous year while he was driving drunk, but Brady soon realizes the list of suspects is quite a bit longer. 

Finally the climax comes and the murder is solved--with all the villains paying dearly for their murderous greed.  Now I know the answer to, "Who murdered the vet?" but I still have no idea whether this was the first or second time I read this book.