Bøger af Richard Helms

Cordite Wine is tough, funny, exciting, and very good!-Robert B. Parker, Mystery Writers of America Grand MasterFINALIST FOR THE 2006 PWA SHAMUS AWARD!Asa Corona, heir to a Napa Valley winery fortune, hires private eye Eamon Gold to stop an extortionist. Corona has been photographed in gay bathhouses in San Francisco, and now blackmailers are demanding money to avoid releasing the pictures to Corona's family. He paid them off once, but now they want more money.Gold agrees to help find the blackmailers, but his search quickly becomes grisly, as his prime suspect is found murdered, and his client disappears. In the search for the killers and his missing client, Gold runs up against closeted television stars, a gay linebacker, frightened politicians, and a mobster who doesn't want his life examined too closely-and is willing to kill to prevent it! Richard Helms writes the classic private eye novel with panache, class, and a self-assured breeziness. Helms and his hero, Eamon Gold, are welcome additions to the genre!-S.J. Rozan, Edgar Award-winning author of Absent Friends

On a frigid January day on London's Whitehall in 1843, a Scottish woodturner named Daniel M'Naghten guns down Edward Drummond, believing him to be British Prime Minister Robert Peel. M'Naghten, who sympathizes with the Chartist cause in Great Britain, claims he intended to murder the Prime Minister-a Tory-because he blames Peel for persecution by the Tories in his home city of Glasgow. Queen Victoria, incensed at the most recent attempt on a high government official's life, demands that M'Naghten be hanged. M'Naghten, however, demonstrates every accepted sign of insanity, which would save him a visit to Tyburn Tree. Queen's Counsel Alexander Cockburn is hired to defend M'Naghten, and he recruits legendary thief-taker Vicar Brekonridge to travel to Glasgow to investigate M'Naghten's claims, with the goal of supporting an insanity plea. He sends young law clerk Simon Daughtrey to Glasgow with Brekonridge, and together they uncover contradictory evidence suggesting that M'Naghten's motivations in the murder of Edward Drummond might be considerably more sinister than mental illness. With M'Naghten's trial days away, Brekonridge and Daughtrey race to find the truth behind the assassination of Edward Drummond.

Thunder Moon is a damned fine book! Five-time Shamus Award nominee and Derringer and Thriller Award winner Richard Helms twists the plot like a strand of DNA without ever cheating the reader out of excitement or emotional depth. One of my favorite novels of the year!"-Reed Farrel Colemen, three-time Shamus Award-winning author of What You BreakTempers and violence always seem to flare during the scorching summer months in rural Prosperity, North Carolina. Within the span of several weeks, police chief Judd Wheeler will deal with a police standoff, multiple murders, a motorcycle gang war, a paroled sex offender, con games perpetrated by an itinerant tent preacher, and an incursion of evil more malevolent than tiny Bliss County has ever seen!Steve Samples, a promising draft pick for the NFL Pooler Pythons football team, is found naked and brutally hacked to death with a meat cleaver. In Samples' pants pockets upstairs are bloodstained twenty-dollar bills, and Wheeler can't explain how they got there. Wheeler discovers that Samples was with a woman the night before he died, and the woman has a dangerous boyfriend who becomes Wheeler's prime suspect. The blood on the money links the boyfriend to two murders, but Wheeler can't find him anywhere. Wheeler realizes he is looking at a series of seemingly unrelated crimes unified by a single vengeful entity that has descended on Prosperity like a suffocating black cloud. Bodies begin to pile like winter cordwood, and the only thing standing between Prosperity and a descent into chaos is the steady-eyed, broad-shouldered figure of Chief Judd Wheeler. In the tiny North Carolina farm town called Prosperity, it seems nothing comes to a good end in the shadow 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 Dead Man RunningProsperity, North Carolina, used to be a red-clay farming community populated by descendants of the families who settled it over two centuries earlier. Then, developers from the metropolis in the next county discovered its rolling hills and winding streams, and decided to turn it into a suburb.Former Atlanta cop and local high school football star Judd Wheeler returned to Prosperity eight years ago to take a position of Chief of the new police department. With one tragic exception, it's been an uneventful job. Now, the body of a young illegal immigrant Mexican girl has been found on the banks of Six Mile Creek. For the first time since his return to Prosperity, Judd Wheeler finds himself with a murder on his hands. His investigation will place him in conflict with his closest childhood friend, ratchet up racial and class tensions in a community already stretched to the limit, and nearly tear his quiet little town to pieces. At the same time, coincidences he cannot ignore will stoke Chief Wheeler's nightmares of terrible events years earlier and compromise his ability to see the case clearly.In the small town of Prosperity, the line between desperation and salvation runs straight down the middle of Six Mile Creek!"Richard Helms, a multiple Shamus Award nominee and winner of the Derringer and Thriller Awards, has created an engrossing and timely story that will appeal to a wide range of readers!"-Barbara Bibel, ALA Booklist

Pat Gallegher's back in action!Someone is stalking and killing strippers in the French Quarter, and the latest victim is Lucy Nivens, the new girlfriend of Shorty the bartender, Pat Gallegher's employer. Against his better judgment, Gallegher agrees to draw on his experience as a forensic psychologist and help NOPD detective Farley Nuckolls find the killer, when a retired FBI profiler is reluctant to be associated with the case. At first, Gallegher is only supposed to act as the mouthpiece for the profiler, but as the case becomes more complex he finds himself drawn deeper into the twisted mind of his quarry. When the killer sets his sights on Gallegher and his girlfriend Merlie Comineau, the case becomes extremely personal, very quickly. Retired forensic psychologist Richard Helms once again keenly captures the sights, sounds, and smells of the French Quarter, in a fast-paced, pulse-pounding race against time, as Gallegher has to find the Stripper Ripper and put him out of business, before Merlie becomes his next victim!Richard Helms' Pat Gallegher stories have won or been finalists for the PWA Shamus Award, ITW Thriller Award, SMFS Derringer Award, and MRI Macavity Award.

A new thriller from Derringer and Thriller Award Winner Richard Helms!Imagine returning home from a business trip to find that your agoraphobic wife has disappeared, along with every trace of evidence that you had been married, or that she had even existed. David Proctor, believing his wife Barbara has been abducted, frantically seeks help from the police, but they reject his claims, suspecting that he is trying to run some kind of scam. Desperate for help, Proctor turns to Savannah private eye Hollis Dayton. Suspecting that Barbara Proctor might have been conning David all along, Hollis Dayton launches an investigation, and uncovers a stunning web of false identities, deceit, fraud, and murder. Worse, the deeper they delve into the disappearance of David Proctor's wife, the more convinced they becomes that Barbara might have vanished because of her involvement in a horrifying terrorist plot which has the potential to make the attacks of 9/11 pale in comparison!With just hours left before a disaster of unimaginable proportions, Hollis and David dash across country in a last-ditch effort to avert The Daedalus Deception!

Pat Gallegher's back...in the 1930s, in this new hardboiled classic from Richard Helms, author of the critically acclaimed Juicy Watusi.When construction workers unearth a body buried in a concrete floor next to Holliday's, jazz cornet player and knight errant Pat Gallegher's boss Shorty worries that delays may keep him from finishing the work by his buyer's move-in date. He hires Gallegher to investigate what appears to be a seventy-year-old murder. What Gallegher doesn't know, however, is that a killing that took place during the Great Depression is deviously entwined with his own more recent past. By delving into the mystery, he will uncover modern corruption of massive proportions and place himself in harm's way when the Anolli crime family decides to have him killed. With the assistance of Scat Boudreaux, Gallegher has only hours to uncover a major scandal in New Orleans government, solve the seventy-year-old murder of Scott Everidge, avoid the ire of a suspicious police detective, and try to stay alive in the process!Join Pat Gallegher for another French Quarter tale of cool jazz and hot knuckles-and-know-how action!Richard Helms' Pat Gallegher stories have won or been finalists for the PWA Shamus Award, ITW Thriller Award, SMFS Derringer Award, and the MRI Macavity Award.

Noted trial lawyer Taylor Chu has been found brutally murdered at the base of the Bay Bridge, missing his hands, feet, and head. 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!Derringer and Thriller award-winning author Richard Helms delivers 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. "If the first chapter doesn't hook you on Grass Sandal, give up reading mysteries!" --Jeremiah Healy, Shamus Award-winning author of SPIRAL, and THE ONLY GOOD LAWYER "More twists and turns than Lombard Street. Richard Helms serves up some of the smartest dialogue in the genre!"--William Kent Krueger, Edgar Award-winning author of ORDINARY GRACE

PAT GALLEGHER'S BACK!Back in trouble, that is! After the back alley execution of his friend Hotshot Spano at the hands of a gang of teenaged Haitian thugs, slacker New Orleans jazz cornetist and occasional knight errant Pat Gallegher is recruited by Lucho Braga, the capo of the New Orleans mob, to help find the killers. Gallegher has his own problems, in the form of a ten year old girl he has found scrounging for food in the garbage behind the dive bar where he lives and works. The girl has a deadly secret. Her stepfather, Jimmy Binh, is a powerful boss of the Vietnamese gangs just across the Crescent City Bridge in Algiers, and she ran away after watching Binh kill a woman.Gallegher uncovers a startling connection between Binh and the murder of Hotshot Spano-a link that could spell all-out war in the French Quarter underworld.Expect cool jazz and hot action, as Gallegher has to protect Binh's stepdaughter, find Spano's killers, navigate a brewing romance with the director of a local runaway shelter, and somehow not become a victim of Jimmy Binh's power-driven rampage!Richard Helms' Pat Gallegher stories have won or been finalists for the PWA Shamus Award, ITW Thriller Award, SMFS Derringer Award, and MRI Macavity Award.

Pat Gallegher has been running from his life for years. A failed seminary student, retired psychologist, and disgraced college professor, he finds himself in his late forties playing jazz cornet in a New Orleans French Quarter 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 disappeared. Clancey fears that Lester Vincouer, her husband, has had Cain killed. Gallegher searches for Cain, and uncovers a twisted arrangement between Lester and the New Orleans mob. When Lester Vincouer is murdered, Gallegher realizes he has been cleverly framed.The search for Sammy Cain becomes a quest for the real killer of Lester Vincouer, and everyone 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 might be his swan song-on Death Row!Richard Helms' Pat Gallegher series has been nominated for the PWA Shamus Award, the ITW Thriller Award, the SMFS Derringer Award, and the MRI Macavity Award.

For the first time, collected in a single volume, Black Arch Books is proud to present the short crime fiction of Derringer, Macavity, Shamus, and Thriller Award-winning author Richard Helms!Paper Walls/Glass Houses (2008 Derringer Award Winner)The Gospel According to Gordon Black (2008 Derringer Award Winner)Silicon Kings (2011 Derringer Award Finalist)The Gods for Vengeance Cry (2011 Derringer Award Finalist; 2011 Macavity Award Finalist; 2011 Thriller Award Winner)Busting Red Heads (2015 Derringer Award Finalist; 2015 Shamus Award Finalist; 2015 Thriller Award Finalist)Shooting Stars (2016 Derringer Award Finalist)See Humble and Die (2021 Derringer Award Finalist; Best American Mystery Stories 2020)The Cripplegate Apprehension (2020 Derringer Award Finalist)Sweeps Week (2022 Macavity Award Winner; 2022 Shamus Award Winner)Nine tales of suspense, mystery, and intrigue carefully crafted to provide you with hours of reading pleasure!

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 has brutalized and raped a young child, and these very professionals will confront their own weaknesses, fears, failures, and opportunistic desires.Before Bobby can be brought to justice, careers will tumble, reputations will be destroyed, and an innocent family will be torn apart forever.What Bobby did to his victim was horrible.What happened in court, though, was a crime.Former forensic psychologist and critically acclaimed mystery and thriller author Richard Helms draws on his extensive courtroom experience and his national recognition as an expert in sex crimes to deliver a taut, gripping, deeply thought-provoking courtroom drama in his thrilling new novel, Bobby J.

Three teenagers are unwilling participants in a horrific event that results in a young man's death.

A Look over My Shoulder begins with President Nixon's attempt to embroil the Central Intelligence Agency, of which Richard Helms was then the director, in the Watergate cover-up. Helms then recalls his education in Switzerland and Germany and at Williams College; his early career as a foreign correspondent in Berlin, during which he once lunched with Hitler; and his return to newspaper work in the United States. Helms served on the German desk at OSS headquarters in London; subsequently, he was assigned to Allen Dulles's Berlin office in postwar Germany.On his return to Washington, Helms assumed responsibility for the OSS carryover operations in Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe. He remained in this post until the Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947. At CIA, Helms served in many positions, ultimately becoming the organization's director from 1966 to 1973. He was appointed ambassador to Iran later that year and retired from government service in January 1977. It was often thought that Richard Helms, who served longer in the Central Intelligence Agency than anyone else, would never tell his story, but here it is-revealing, news-making, and with candid assessments of the controversies and triumphs of a remarkable career.