Richard Barre Mystery Novels

Richard Barre Books

Blackheart Highway by Richard Barre

Book Description
With his first novel, the Shamus Award-winner The Innocents, and his acclaimed follow-ups, Bearing Secrets and The Ghosts of Morning, Richard Barre has emerged as "one of the best hardboiled detective novelists of the '90's" (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review). Now, with Blackheart Highway, he takes the genre for the ride of its life. Southern California PI Wil Hardesty makes a living searching for the truth. But this search always seems to draw him back to his own troubled past, shadowed by loss. His latest case takes him into the life of Doc Whitney, a country music star who was found guilty of killing his wife and young daughters twenty years ago. Now Doc has been paroled. In a town divided over his release, two people with very different agendas recruit Wil. One wants Doc gone-permanently. The other is convinced of his innocence. Now Wil must reconstruct a life, and track down a killer. And survive...

Bearing Secrets by Richard Barre

PI Wil Hardesty must face more than his past when the discovery of the 17-year-old wreckage of a plane--and its illicit cargo--prompts the suicide of '60s radical Max Pfieffer. Pfieffer's daughter knows it wasn't suicide. She wants Hardesty to unearth the truth, even if it means unearthing past sins better left in peace...

The Innocents by Richard Barre

Amazon.com
Author Richard Barre kicked off his Wil Hardesty series with this smart, psychologically nuanced first novel, which garnered a 1996 Shamus Award. As The Innocents opens, a flash flood in the California desert has uncovered the dessicated remains of seven children. The only clue to their identity: a worn St. Christopher medal inscribed "Vaya Con Dios, Benito. Papa, 1967."
Years before, as an impoverished Mexican peasant, Ignacio Reyes, sold his youngest son to a border runner. He used the money to bring his family over into the United States and open the first of his chain of successful restaurants, but he's been tortured with guilt ever since. Meanwhile, aging surfer, Vietnam vet, and private detective Wil Hardesty is wrestling with his own demons after his son's accidental drowning four years earlier and his own subsequent breakdown.

When Reyes contacts Wil, asking him to investigate the deaths of those seven children, Hardesty unearths far more than just bones--including artifacts from a bloodthirsty Santeria cult. The plot is gripping, the dialogue sharp, and the villains very villainous indeed, but the character of Wil Hardesty is what separates this mystery from the rest of the pack. More than just another private-eye-with-a-troubled-past, Hardesty is both complicated and flawed, a very real human who brings a lifetime's worth of pain, passion, and guilt to bear on solving this crime.
Book Description
There are seven of them. Children--innocents--whose long-buried remains are uncovered by a flash-flood. No one knows who could have committed such a crime. Clues are scarce, and with the media turning the story into a law enforcement nightmare, time is short. Only Wil Hardesty, a private eye who has more in common with the case than anyone knows, is willing to push hard enough--and dig deep enough--to find the cruelest of killers. The killer of The Innocents...

The Ghosts of Morning by Richard Barre

Amazon.com
In Richard Barre's The Ghosts of Morning, a homicide that exploded the glorious sun, surf, and beach-party youth of two teenage surfers in still-golden Southern California reemerges to haunt the lives of the survivors.
Wil Hardesty, Vietnam vet, ex-surfer and ex-husband (introduced in Barre's Shamus-winning The Innocents) is sucked into the intrigues of a wealthy and powerful family, the Van Zants. Denny Van Zant, Wil's mentor and friend in the Southern California surfing fraternity, enlisted in the Vietnam-era Marines to escape allegations of a homicide cover-up and died in the bloody assault on Hue. Now, however, his mother has received an anonymous letter. Denny is alive, and for a large sum of money, he can be found. She needs an investigator. Hardesty, pulled into the investigation by gratitude for past kindnesses, finds himself ensnared and finally endangered by the opposing claims of loyalty, love, and, finally, the truth.

Barre's well-crafted narrative propels a believably human Hardesty into the worlds of news reporting, police investigations, body builders, dingy seaside motels, and a haunted post-Vietnam bivvy for burnouts outside Hilo, Hawaii. Amid escalating violence, each puzzle Hardesty solves raises new questions. He moves inexorably toward a final confrontation in the penthouse of an L.A. office tower, looking down on the glittering lights and dark shadows of his city and his past.

OxfordBooks.com / Oxford, MS

Amazon.com is pleased to have Dr. John Holleman in the family of Amazon.com associates. We've agreed to ship products and provide customer service for orders we receive through special links on Dr. Holleman's online bookseller.
Amazon.com associates list selected books and music in an editorial context that helps you make the right choice. We encourage you to shop at Dr. Holleman's bookseller often to see what new items they've selected for you.
Thank you for shopping with an Amazon.com associate.
Sincerely,
Jeff Bezos, President Amazon.com