Works by
Richard Helms
(Writer)

Eamon Gold PI Series

1. Grass Sandal (2004)
   The first book in the Eamon Gold PI series. Noted San Francisco trial attorney Taylor Chu has been found brutally murdered at the base of the Bay Bridge, missing his head, hands, and feet. The newspapers, television, and radio news are filled with the story. How, then, can he also be sipping Glenlivet in private eye Eamon Gold's office? As Gold tries to solve this puzzle, he encounters ambitious Homeland Security agents, Marin County pornographers, Chinatown tong overlords, corrupt police officers, and a plot to import Hong Kong triad soldiers to start a gang war in San Francisco's Chinatown!

   Two-time Shamus Award nominee Richard Helms provides fast-paced, hard-hitting, knuckles-and-know-how action in the City By The Bay, in this exciting debut of his Eamon Gold series, Grass Sandal!

2. Cordite Wine (2005) -- Nominated for the 2006 Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award
   Eamon Gold is approached by Napa Valley winery heir Asa Corona to help stop people who are blackmailing him with pictures taken in a San Francisco gay bathhouse. The routine case becomes complicated when Gold's prime suspect is murdered, and his client disappears. While trying to find the murderer, and his missing client, Eamon Gold runs across closeted kiddie show stars, a gay pro football linebacker, potentially corrupted politicians, and a nasty gangster with a secret worth killing to keep.

Pat Gallegher Mystery Series

1. Joker Poker (2002)
   Pat Gallegher has been running from life for years. After failing as a seminary student, a forensic psychologist and a college professor, he finds himself in his late forties playing cornet in a New Orleans French Quarter dive bar. One meeting with Clancey Vincouer changes his life. She tells him the sordid story of her affair with a con man named Sammy Cain who has now disappeared. . As Gallegher attempts to find Cain, he uncovers a twisted arrangement between Clancey's husband and the New Orleans mob. When Lester Vincouer is murdered, Gallegher realizes that he has been cleverly framed. The search for Sammy Cain becomes a quest for the real killer of Lester Vincouer, and everyone he knew seems to have a motive-including the leggy, seductive redhead with whom Gallegher has fallen head over heels in lust. With a tenacious police detective dogging his trail, Gallegher has only days to discover who really killed Vincouer, or the next tune he plays could be from Death Row.

2. Voodoo That You Do (2001)
   Pat Gallegher, New Orleans jazz-musician and reluctant knight-errant, witnesses the murder of a close friend, mob button man Hotshot Spano. The New Orleans mob capo forcefully recruits Gallegher to help find the killers, Haitian teenagers who may have been hired, it turns out, to spur a war between the Vietnamese and Sicilian syndicates. Gallegher has his own problems, however, in the form of a  a 10-year-old girl who's run away from her Vietnamese mob-leader stepfather, and a burgeoning love affair with the auburn-haired, violet-eyed director of the local runaway shelter, where Gallegher has brought the young girl. Can Gallegher, the only one privy to various inside information, head off a gangland war and simultaneously pursue his romantic interest?

3. Juicy Watusi (2002) -- Nominated for the 2003 Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award
   Someone is killing strippers in New Orleans' French Quarter, and the latest victim is Lucy Nivens, the girlfriend of Pat Gallegher's boss, Shorty. When Shorty is arrested for her murder, Gallegher agrees to help clear him. Then the FBI profiler assigned to the case commits suicide, leaving the New Orleans Police Department temporarily without a forensic profiler. The man they approach about the job refuses to act publicly, and requests that Gallegher - a retired forensic psychologist himself - be the public mouthpiece for the profiling portion of the investigation. Gallegher reluctantly agrees, but things turn nasty when he finds himself being relied on more and more as the real profiler. Bad turns to worse when the killer - angered by the profile released to the news media - turns his sights on Gallegher's girlfriend, Merlie Comineau!

4. Wet Debt (2003) -- Nominated for the 2004 Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award
   Pat Gallegher's back ... in the 1930's! Construction workers uncover a body buried in a concrete floor next to Holliday's, the bar where Gallegher lives and works. Holliday's owner, Shorty, who also owns the building where the body was found, asks Gallegher to look into what looks like a seventy-year-old murder. What Gallegher doesn't know, however, is that a murder that took place during the Great Depression is deviously intertwined with his own more recent past. By delving into the mystery, Gallegher will uncover modern corruption of massive proportions and place himself in harm's way, when the Anolli crime family decides to have him removed from the case - permanently!

Other Fiction

• The Valentine Profile (2002)
  Disenchanted with his career, Charleston psychologist Mark Lovell yearns for adventure and intrigue. Sometimes you should be very careful what you wish for. He stumbles across a psychiatric chart on the desk of one of his partners, which seems to indicate that the partner is not only treating a Senatorial front-runner named Matthew Valentine, but that the candidate is suffering from a severe disorder that could render him incapable of serving, if elected. When Valentine's illness is leaked to the press, and Valentine subsequently commits suicide, all fingers point to Lovell as the person who fed the story to the newspapers. Lovell, however, has become convinced that Valentine was the victim of a carefully crafted smear campaign, and that he was actually murdered! Now, fleeing the police and the press, Lovell realizes that he can only save himself with the information he carries in his head - The Valentine Profile!

• Bobby J (2004)
  Malice and personal ambition clash tragically in this thought-provoking courtroom thriller. Fourteen-year-old Bobby Jessup's violent history was no secret among the professionals who worked with troubled children in his town. Most of them had chosen, for their own reasons, to ignore young Bobby's dark, dangerous potential. Now, he had brutalized and raped a young child, and these very professionals would confront their own weaknesses, fears, failures, and opportunistic desires. Before Bobby could be brought to justice, careers would tumble, reputations would be destroyed, and an innocent family would be torn apart forever.

  What Bobby did to his victim was horrible.

  What happened in court, though, was a crime.

• The Amadeus Legacy (2002)
  Set in 1986. Twelve years ago, reporter Geoffrey Sterling played an important role in the downfall of an American president, and in the process lost everything he held dear. Now, a professional student at a small Maryland college, he spends his time getting high and writing scathing editorials for the school paper, while working hard not to graduate. He is assigned to interview an ex-NSA operative named Kenneth Boland, who has written a tell-all book about the US intelligence community. When Boland's house explodes, Boland's last words to Sterling - Amadeus! - propel Sterling headlong onto the game board in international intrigue as a major player. Possessing a deadly, centuries-old secret, now only Geoffrey Sterling can head off a geopolitical maelstrom predicted over four-hundred years earlier, even as he tries to keep from being killed himself by the latest generation of a dynasty of assassins dating back to the martyrdom of Thomas a Becket. Avid readers of The DaVinci Code will devour Richard Helms' The Amadeus Legacy!