SILVER FALCHION, DERRINGER, THRILLER, MACAVITY, and SHAMUS AWARD WINNING CRIMEWRITER
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RICHARD HELMS
THE BOOKS
DOCTOR HATE
ISBN 978-1-68512-077-1
THE SEQUEL TO THE 2021 SHAMUS AWARD-WINNING BRITTLE KARMA
Richard Helms’ Derringer Award-winning (The Gospel According to Gordon Black) and Shamus Award-winning (Brittle Karma) San Francisco private eye Eamon Gold returns in Doctor Hate, a tale cast in molds forged by Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Robert B. Parker.
Brandon Hunt is an arch-conservative, racist, sexist, xenophobic college professor, and he isn't shy about it. Having won almost termination-proof tenure in a lawsuit against the university, he has become a lightning rod for controversy with his vitriolic diatribes in public speeches and the press, earning him the nickname Doctor Hate.
Now, Hunt has been attacked on campus and brutally beaten. He hires San Francisco private eye Eamon Gold and his new partner, detective-in-training Sonny Malehala, for personal protection as the police investigate the assault. Then, Hunt reveals to Gold that he's being blackmailed, and the case takes a much darker turn.
"Helms melds his ripped-from-the-headlines premise with a classic PI, crackling dialogue and a vivid eye for character to create a compulsive page-turner. Eamon Gold is one to root for, and Doctor Hate is one you won't be able to put down."
—James D.F. Hannah, Shamus-winning author of Behind the Wall of Sleep and She Talks to Angels
BRITTLE KARMA
ISBN-13: 978-09710159-7-5
NOW A 2021 PWA SHAMUS AWARD WINNER!
Abner Carlisle spent a quarter century in a ten-by-six cell on twenty-three hour a day lockdown, serving a sentence for a botched armored car robbery. After he is released, he asks Eamon Gold to find the wheelman for the robbery, Eddie Rice, who disappeared years earlier with the take and Carlisle's daughter Lydia. Gold suspects that Carlisle intends to murder Rice, and refuses the case. Carlisle is found murdered in his hotel room days later, piquing Gold's interest. Gold discovers that the insurance company that paid off the armored car claim will pay ten percent for any amount of the heist money that is recovered.
Gold, temporarily bucks-up but ready for a challenge, takes up the search for Eddie Rice on spec, trying to make a little quick bank on the coldest of cold cases he's ever investigated. As usual, things become complicated.
PAID IN SPADES
ISBN-13: 978-0978842734
NOW A 2020 PWA SHAMUS AWARD FINALIST and
KILLER NASHVILLE SILVER FALCHION AWARD WINNER!
Pat Gallegher, jazz cornet player and private-eye-without-portfolio in steamy New Orleans, returns home from a two week vacation to find two jobs waiting for him. Six months earlier, the man who save his life--Cabby Jacks--gave Gallegher a blank check with a request to find him should he ever disappear. Now, Jacks has vanished, and Gallegher is on the trail. At the same time, Gallegher's longtime girlfriend, social worker Merlie Comineau, asks him to find the father of a young girl in homeless shelter. The girl needs minor surgery, and her father has to give permission or the girl will be handed over to foster care. As Gallegher juggles two missing person cases, he slowly realizes that they are tantalizingly connected.
The Pat Gallegher series has been nominated for the Shamus, Derringer, Macavity, Silver Falchion, and Thriller Awards, and won the Thriller Award for Best Short Story in 2011 and the Silver Falchion Award in 2020!
THE MOJITO COAST
ISBN-13: 978-1795736404
A 2014 PWA Shamus Award Finalist!
Fans of Randy Wayne White, James W. Hall, and Robert B. Parker will love this action-packed private eye adventure! On the eve of the 1958 Cuban Revolution, Miami private eye Cormac Loame reluctantly returns to Havana to retrieve the teenaged daughter of former prizefighter-turned-mob money launderer Cecil "Madman" Hacker. As he combs the city, he will run across notorious gangsters, jai-alai bums, famous authors, revolutionaries, movie stars, and a renewed love affair with the woman he left behind six years earlier. With Castro's rebels edging closer to the Cuban capital every day, Loame races time to find Lila Hacker, as he also plots to spirit his lover Marisol Gonzalez back to Miami, copes with a possibly treacherous former buddy, and tries not to get killed or forfeit his soul in the process.
SIX MILE CREEK
ISBN-13: 978-1795386135
Prosperity, North Carolina, used to be just a wide spot in the road, a red-clay farming community inhabited by the descendants of settlers who had pioneered there three centuries earlier. Now, its rolling hills and bucolic charm have been discovered by the urban residents of a nearby metropolis, and Judd Wheeler's home town is being transformed into a bedroom community suburb. Class tensions between the longtime residents and the newcomers is accented by a third factor--the influx of illegal Mexican immigrants looking for work.
When a teen-aged Mexican girl is found murdered on the banks of Six Mile Creek, the pressure cooker threatens to explode, and only Prosperity Police Chief Judd Wheeler can relieve the pressure by finding the killer!
THUNDER MOON
ISBN-978-1795447669
It's July in tiny Prosperity, NC, and temperatures are blistering. 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 police chief Judd 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.
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.
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!
THE UNRESOLVED SEVENTH
ISBN-978-1795854238
The Unresolved Seventh introduces a new and unique protagonist: Ben Long, a brilliant and deductive retired forensic psychologist who has Asperger's Syndrome, a type of high-functioning autism. Quirky and socially inhibited, Long is lured out of retirement by his old friend, District Attorney Sid Kingsley, to complete a psychological evaluation on a young man charged with killing his brother's fiancee. Assisted by Paula Paige, a middle-aged law clerk, Long is supposed to find that his client is not mentally handicapped, and therefore eligible for the death penalty. His investigation leads him to believe not only that his client is incompetent, but in fact that he might not have committed the crime at all! If Junior Torrence didn't kill his brother's fiancee, who did? It's up to Ben Long to solve that mystery.
OLDER THAN GOODBYE
ISBN- 978-1795668118
Judd Wheeler, police chief in tiny Prosperity, North Carolina, has never encountered a more dangerous criminal, or a more resourceful one, than he does in Older Than Goodbye. Wheeler’s job consisted mostly of handing out traffic tickets and quelling the occasional domestic disturbance. He never expected to get shot and lose half a year of his life in recovery. Within days of returning to work, Wheeler has to cope with the disappearance of a banker and his Russian mail-order bride, the murder of the most hated man in town, and the return of a boyhood friend he helped send to prison thirty years earlier. “Shug” Burch has risen from convict to world-renowned country-blues singer, and has returned to Bliss County to open a music club and restaurant. Burch’s long history of violence worries Chief Wheeler, who already has a plate full of trouble as he suspects that seemingly unrelated crimes in his community are linked by a single malevolent force he fears he cannot control or stop. The stakes mount as a Russian gangster plots to kill Chief Wheeler, who must turn to an unexpected ally for help!