HIGH PRAISE FOR THE EAMON GOLD PI SERIES, BY RICHARD HELMS
"If the first chapter of Grass Sandal doesn't hook you, give up reading mysteries. Highly recommended!" -
Jeremiah Healy, Shamus Award Winner, author of SPIRAL, and THE ONLY GOOD LAWYER
"Eamon Gold is clearly the rightful heir to the sacred territory of Sam Spade. More twists and turns than Lombard Street. Richard Helms delivers some of the smartest dialogue in the genre!"
-William Kent Krueger, Anthony Award Winner, author of BLOOD HOLLOW
"Both the initial entry and Cordite Wine (September 2005) offer a return to classic "dick lit" (i.e. private eye fiction) in a classic location."
-Publishers Weekly Authors on the Ascendent
"Richard Helms writes the classic private eye novel with panache, class, and a self-assured breeziness. Cordite Wine moves with ease among northern California's bathhouses, vineyards, cop shops and mob joints. Helms and his hero, Eamon Gold, are welcome additions to the genre."
- SJ Rozan, Edgar Award Winner and author of IN THIS RAIN.
"Cordite Wine is tough, funny, exciting, and very good!"
- Robert B. Parker, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.
THE EAMON GOLD SERIES
Eamon Gold is a throwback to the era of Mike Hammer and Sam Spade. He's a real knuckles-and-know-how private eye who isn't afraid to toss a little muscle around when it will get the job done. A blown knee in college left him without a future in football, so after graduating he joined the police force in San Francisco. Five years later, he traded in the bubbletop for an office next to Hyde Pier and a career as a private cop. His downtime is filled with molding raw wood into exquisite musical instruments for friends, but his true calling is justice, and maybe a few bucks to tide him over to the next case.
THE BOOKS
A desperate housewife seeks out Gallegher's help when she fears that her lover has been killed - by her husband!
Gallegher's past as a forensic psychologist comes back to haunt him when he's asked to help find a killer who's murdering strippers in the French Quarter!
Gallegher witnesses his friend Hotsot Spano's murder by teenaged Haitian hoods, and he's tapped to find the killers by the head of the New Orleans mob!
A murder committed in the 1930s includes a strange link to Gallegher's own violent past, when he's asked to find out who was buried in a concrete floor!
Nominated for the 2003 PWA Shamus Award!
Nominated for the 2004 PWA Shamus Award!
ACCLAIM FOR THE PAT GALLEGHER SERIES, BY RICHARD HELMS
"...For fans of noir mysteries, this debut offers a hearty concoction of violence, intrigue, sex, and even a little articulate humor!..."
-The Library Journal, about Joker Poker
"...Helms, an author of exceptional talent, does not disappoint. I highly recommend Voodoo That You Do to readers who like their mysteries served up noir!..."
-Jonni Rich, Ivy Quill Reviews
"...The seminary-trained Irish musician-cum-profiler Pat Gallegher steps out of retirement to smartly solve his third mystery in...Juicy Watusi. The plot is solid hardboiled fare... and even better is the middle-aged investigator's snappy observations about the Quarter's characters..."
-Publishers Weekly Mystery Notes
..." (Wet Debt) is fast-paced and well-written with the gritty kind of straight-up dialogue one expects from noir detective fiction. Readers will notice echoes of Hammett here...there's no lack of mystery and action!
-Carl Brookins, Mystery Scene Magazine
Taylor Chu is dead - the papers say so, the television news says so, and the medical examiner says so. How, then, can the noted trial lawyer be sitting in Eamon Gold's office, sipping Glenlivet single malt? To find out, San Francisco PI Eamon Gold will tussle with corrupt cops, wily attorneys, and a budding gang war in Chinatown! It's hard to determine who the good guys are in this hardboiled traditional private eye tale!
NOMINATED FOR THE 2006 PRIVATE EYE WRITERS OF AMERICA SHAMUS AWARD!
Asa Corona stands to inherit a winery fortune from his aging grandfather - that is, if pictures taken of him in a San Francisco gay bathhouse aren't made public. Corona asks Eamon Gold to find his blackmailers, but when his client disappears Gold is faced with a much larger problem. Suspects are dying at every turn, and a gangster with a lot to lose has turned his sights on Gold!
THE STAND-ALONE NOVELS
While most of Richard Helms' work has been in the area of series fiction, he does have three stand-alone novels in print, with one or two more in progress. The novels in print are shown below.
Malice and tragedy intertwine in this noirish courtroom drama. Fifteen-year-old Bobby Jessup has been charged with the brutal beating and rape of a five year old boy, unleashing blind ambition and suppressed resentments in the county courthouse. What Bobby did to his innocent victim was horrible. What happened in court, though, was a crime!
NAKED CAME THE FLAMINGO - The Anthology!
Charleston psychologist Mark Lovell thought he had it made, until the day he ran across the psychiatric chart for prominent Senate candidate Matthew Valentine on a colleague's desk. When Valentine dies, the clues point to murder, and Lovell as a prime suspect! Without knowing it, he holds the key to his salvation in his own mind - the secret of The Valentine Profile!
Twelve years ago, Geoffrey Sterling helped depose a President of the United States. Since then, he only wants to be left alone. A chance interview with the author of a tell-all spy memoir is disrupted by a bomb, and the author's dying words - Amadeus! - thrust Sterling on the game board of international intrigue as a prime player! To save his life he must uncover the amazing secret of The Amadeus Legacy!
Several years ago, members of the Florida Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America decided to write a serial novel. They quickly discovered that the National office of MWA frowned most decidedly on Regional Chapters getting into the book publishing business, so the perpetrators.... er, that is, the authors approached Joanne Sinchuk at the Murder on the Beach Bookstore in Fort Lauderdale to do the actual publishing.
The result was Naked Came The Flamingo, one of the funniest send-ups of hardboiled PI thrillers to come along in years.
Contributing authors, in no particular order, included: Barbara Parker, PJ Parrish, Elaine Viets, Randy Rawls, PJ Pippin, Barbara Fox, Janet Rogerson, AM Abramson, Joan Bond, Barbara Schading, Susan Andrews, Kate Holmes, Audrey Roberts, Britin Haller, Gregg Brickman, Carolyn Cain, Diane Warner, Richard Helms (Hey, that's me!), Stephanie Saxon Levine, Victoria Landis, Cynthia S. Smith, and Joan Mickelson.
The reviews, not surprisingly, were overwhelmingly tongue-in-bill!
"Cheesy villains, a saucy heroine - a riot of delicious fun for the hard boiled fan"..."Bard and feathered, this slippery mystery delivers squawks of delight"..."High-flying suspense...a scrambled plot...this story is no featherweight!"
You get the idea. It was all in good fun, we think, and it
even made a few bucks for Joanne. There still may be a few copies limping
around out there - at last count there are three used copies available at
Amazon. Grab you one before it goes bad!
THE JUDD WHEELER SERIES
After setting mystery/thriller series in such far-flung locales as New Orleans, San Francisco, and Washington DC, Richard Helms returns to his Tar Heel roots to offer a new small-town police procedural series set in North Carolina.
Prosperity used to be a quiet farm village populated by the descendents of the same families that had settled it almost three centuries earlier. Crime was almost nonexistent. Then, developers discovered its rolling bucolic hills and hypnotically flowing streams--and, not coincidentally, its very low property tax rate--and decided that Prosperity would be a perfect place for city folk to move, to get "away from it all." As bedroom communities full of McMansions sprung up in Prosperity like a noxious fungus, the population doubled, then tripled, and finally grew so large that the Town Council could no longer ignore the fact that it needed its own resident police force.
Prosperity native and high school football star Judd Wheeler was tapped to head the nascent department, based on his decade of experience patrolling the tough streets of Atlanta's most desperate neighborhoods. As the face of justice and peace in his formerly peaceful community, Chief Wheeler has to juggle the needs of the families with whom he grew up, and of the interloping newcomers who have brought their big-city problems with them--including a phenomenon foreign to Prosperity as recently as a decade earlier: murder.
Tensions between upper-class tax refugees and long-time Prosperity residents are high enough, but now Chief Judd Wheeler is dealing with an influx of illegal immigrant Mexicans drawn by the promise of work in Prosperity. When the body of sixteen-year-old Gitana 'Gypsy' Camarena is found on the banks of Six Mile Creek, her neck broken, the tensions ratchet up into high gear. Primary suspects include most of the Prosperity Glen High School football team. When Wheeler begins to pressure them for answers, short-sighted residents--including Judd's long-time best friend Kent Kramer--warn him to back off or face the consequences. Fending off attacks and threats from all corners, and at the same time having to deal with his own internal demons and tragic past, Chief Wheeler forges on to a most unexpected discovery--one which may blow the lid off of the cultural pressure cooker which Prosperity has become.
In the tiny farm community of Prosperity, the line between desperation and salvation runs right down the middle of Six Mile Creek!
It's deep July in tiny Prosperity, NC, and temperatures are soaring. Steve Samples, a promising draft pick for the NFL Pooler Pythons, is found naked and brutally hacked to death with a meat cleaver in his home rented from Wheeler’s closest friend Kent Kramer. In Samples’ pants pocket upstairs are bloodstained twenty-dollar bills, and Wheeler can’t explain how they got there.
Things are seldom what they seem in the middle of a heat wave, however, and soon Wheeler realizes that he may be looking at a series of seemingly unrelated crimes unified by a single source of hatred and evil that has descended on Prosperity like a suffocating black cloud. The bodies begin to pile like winter cordwood, and the only thing standing between the deadly onslaught and Prosperity’s descent into chaos is the steady-eyed, broad-shouldered figure of Chief Judd Wheeler.
In the tiny North Carolina farm community of Prosperity, it seems that nothing comes to a good end in the month of the Thunder Moon!
"Six Mile Creek is the most engrossing crime novel I've read all year! This is a real story, with real characters. For me, that's as good as it gets!"
-Steve Hamilton, Edgar Award winning author of The Lock Artist
"... Discrimination against migrant Hispanics and tensions between old residents and newbies keep the plot moving to an unexpected ending.”
-Library Journal (1/15/10)
"...Tightly plotted and refreshingly fast-paced. Veteran Helms introduces a likable protagonist in a promising new series…”
-Kirkus Reviews (2/1/10)
"...Helms, a Shamus Award nominee and a two-time Derringer Award winner, has created an engrossing and timely story that will appeal to a wide range of readers."
-Barbara Bibel, ALA Booklist (2/15/10)
THE DAEDALUS DECEPTION
a standalone ebook thriller
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THE PAT GALLEGHER SERIES
Failed seminarian, retired forensic psychologist, and disgraced college professor Pat Gallegher walked out on a disciplinary hearing after being accused - falsely - of sexually harrassing a coed, and took his act on the road. The road ended in New Orleans, where he took a job as a jazz cornetist in a dive bar off Toulouse Street in the French Quarter. Gambling addiction led to a stint as a legbreaker for a local loanshark. Now, to balance the scales of his soul, Gallegher does 'favors' for friends, and friends of friends. It's a dangerous business, this knight errant gig, but Gallegher's a tough guy with the stuff to pull it off.
