Lena Jones Series

At the age of four, Lena Jones was found lying unconscious by the side of an Arizona Highway, a bullet robbing her of any memories. Now a private detective and scarred survivor of a dozen foster homes, Lena has vowed to find the truth about her childhood.

But Lena's quest is interrupted when her friend, art dealer Clarice Kobe, is beaten to death in her Western Heart Art Gallery on Scottsdale's Main Street. Lena and her Pima Indian partner Jimmy Sisiwan first suspect Clarice's abusive husband, but their investigation soon reveals that domestic violence was far from the only problem in the dead woman's life.

For all her money and beauty, Clarice had far more enemies than friends. Among them are a fiery Apache artist whose graphic work she once banned from her gallery and the daughter of an elderly Hispanic woman whose death was directly attributable to the gallery owner's greed. And Clarice's land developer parents are oddly untroubled by their daughter's murder.

Lena's search for the killer brings violence back into her own life but does it bring her closer to solving her own personal mystery?

Lena thinks she's put her own past behind her, but the sins of Purity's mothers and fathers force her to reexamine the scant memories of her early childhood. At the age of four she was found lying unconscious by the side of an Arizona highway, a bullet in her head. Raised in a series of foster homes, Lena does not remember her real name or the names of her parents. Are Lena's past and this new case somehow connected?

Lena, a survivor of a childhood spent in foster care, is further pained by her sessions with a therapist for anger management. Soon her flashbacks to the time just before her mother shot her four-year-old self accelerate and move her closer to the mystery of her own identity.

Defying the local law, Lena investigates the child's death and uncovers a small town with a big secret. Founded by the descendants of pioneers who fought Geronimo, Los Perdidos now holds a significant population of documented and undocumented foreign-born residents who live and work at a modern plant. Lena senses a sinister force at work in the town - but where?

When two more girls disappear from Los Perdidos, Lena is tempted to implement some frontier justice of her own to battle a cruel and ancient practice.

While running surveillance in an industrial section of Scottsdale, P.I. Lena Jones discovers the body of a woman connected to Second Zion, an infamous polygamy cult based in northern Arizona. With the help of a former "sister wife," Lena discovers a shocking secret: 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 by turning these teens into Arizona's "lost boys."

While searching for the dead woman's lost son, Lena is surprised by a visit from Madeline, the beloved foster mother from whom she'd been forcibly parted at the age of nine. Madeline's presence renews Lena's memories of her own damaged childhood and brings new clues to the identity of her biological parents, who seemingly abandoned her when she was four years old.

But their joyful reunion is interrupted when Lena learns that her close friend, television star Angel Grey, is being stalked by an increasingly violent mental patient. When Lena flies to Angel's aid, she finds that danger has followed her to Hollywood.

Arizona polygamy and its discarded sons, the deceptively insulated world of Beverly Hills, and Lena's lost past converge in a case fraught with danger.

Lena finds not only a community decimated by dangerous mining practices, but a connection to actor John Wayne and the mysterious deaths tied to the 1953 filming of The Conqueror. Now it's up to Lena to uncover the decades-old tragedy no one in Walapai Flats wants to discuss.

The horrific slaughter of a prominent doctor, his wife, and their ten-year-old son brings Thorsson to Private Investigator Lena Jones. The slain family's 14-year-old, Alison, has confessed to the murders. Thorsson wants to hire Lena to discover if Alison is telling the truth, but Lena demands to know what a rising political star wants with a girl she's never met. Desperate for Lena's help, Thorsson reveals her secret—that Alison is the candidate's biological daughter. But that's not all. Thorsson then confides something more 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 shows that Betty Webb is unsparing of her characters yet writes their stories with wit and compassion.

When the man who raped Scottsdale PI 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, violating his parole, 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 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?

At the age of four, Scottsdale private eye Lena Jones was shot in the head and left to die on a Phoenix street. After her rescue, she spent years in the abusive foster care system, never knowing who her parents were and why they didn't claim her. When Desert Redemption begins, she still doesn't know her real name.

Lena's rough childhood—and the suspicion that her parents may have been members of a cult—keeps her hackles raised. So when Chelsea, the ex-wife of Harold Slow Horse, a close friend, joins a "new thought" organization called Kanati, Lena begins to investigate. She soon learns that two communes—polar opposites of each other—have sprung up nearby in the Arizona desert. The participants at EarthWay follow a rigorous dietary regime that could threaten the health of its back-to-the-land inhabitants, while the more pleasure-loving folk at Kanati are dining on sumptuous French cuisine.

On an early morning horseback ride across the Pima Indian Reservation, Lena finds an emaciated woman's body in the desert. "Reservation Woman" lies in a spot close to EarthWay, clad in a dress similar to the ones worn by its women. But there is something about her face that reminds Lena of the Kanatians.

While investigating, Lena's memory is jolted back to that horrible night when her father and younger brother were among those murdered by a cult leader named Abraham, who then vanished. Lena begins to wonder if either EarthWay or Kanati could be linked to that night, and to her own near-death. Could leaders of one or both shed light on what had happened to Lena's mother, who vanished at the same time as Abraham?

All these mysteries are resolved in Desert Redemption, the tenth and final Lena Jones case, which can also be enjoyed on its own.