Dick Moonlight

Some years ago, Moonlight Falls, the first novel in what would become the 2015 Thriller Award- and Shamus Award-winning best-selling hard-boiled detective series was first introduced to the world. Since then, seven Dick Moonlight noir private detective novels have been released to great acclaim. But now, for the first time ever, a longer, grittier, sexier, more dangerous, more romantic version of the original pilot episode is available. It represents the author's original dark vision and the desperate, if not paranoid state of mind he was in when writing it.

A gang of Obama-masked thugs in a downtown Albany alley gave Dick Moonlight a one-way ticket to the Pearly Gates. But when his hovering spirit slips back into his bruised body, the real trouble starts. A private detective with a short-term memory problem, Moonlight knows he’s still in danger. He’s got plenty of enemies to keep him guessing why — even the latest love of his life, Lola, can’t be trusted. But the goons who snuffed him want something else: Moonlight’s latest client, a handicapped nuclear engineer, had a top-secret box the gang believes is in Moonlight’s possession. Moonlight can’t remember any box — but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have it. He just better figure out where it is before he winds up dead for the last time.

PI Dick Moonlight wakes up to find himself on a plummeting plane and handcuffed to an FBI agent. As if his life wasn’t already turbulent enough - his bar burned down; his ex, Lola, left him for another man; and Jack Daniels is his new best friend - the FBI informs him that he’s got unfinished business. His last case, the one with Russian mobsters after a top secret flash drive, isn’t exactly closed.

Richard 'Dick' Moonlight is back!

In the best-selling Moonlight Falls (RJBuckley, 2009), he barely survived his own suicide attempt, not to mention numerous attempts on his life from a gang of Russian thugs operating an illegal organ harvesting operation out of a Saratoga Springs restaurant. Now the former Albany Police Department detective is forced to go through life (or in some cases, near-death) with a piece of .22 caliber bullet lodged in his brain.

What’s a nice, proper dame like Joan Parker doing in a place like Dick Moonlight’s office? The scar running down her face - from the business end of an axe - has something to do with it. Shortly after the attack that killed her husband and left her for dead, she pointed the finger at her son, Christopher, who now sits in jail. But the woman insists the police have it all wrong - Christopher didn’t do it - and she just needs the private eye to prove it. Moonlight knows mothers will say anything to protect their kids. He also knows how the police can take a mistake and run with it.

When a hotshot literary agent by the name of Suzanne Bonchance lures Richard Moonlight into searching for her missing star client -the boozing, womanizing Roger Walls - the private detective finds himself waist-deep in a whole lot of trouble. But when a sexy, young writing MFA student who claims to know Walls comes to his rescue, Moonlight not only becomes smitten with her charm, he also finds himself falling in love with a girl he barely knows. As the trail for Walls narrows and truths are revealed, Moonlight finds himself wanting to run away as fast as his legs will take him.

When a defeated looking man shows up at Moonlight’s riverfront loft in the middle of the night seeking the P.I.’s services, he does something quite unexpected. He kills himself with a gunshot to the head. After the APD Chief Homicide Detective Nick Miller arrives on the scene, it’s discovered the now dead man was married to a cheating woman who goes by the unlikely name of Virginia Gamble.

Dick Moonlight can't help himself. Moonlight, the private detective known as the head case with a bullet lodged in his brain, should be grateful for his current job. But when it becomes clear the cash-starved brain surgeon he's been hired to drive around is protecting his son from a rape conviction, Moonlight is disgusted. Worse, when the charges turn into a case of "reckless murder", Moonlight's the only one trying to keep the kid from the electric chair though the girl - a state senator's daughter - clearly committed suicide.

With Fat Elvis the perfect candidate for a starring role in their new film, Moonlight is hired by the police to go undercover and expose the snuff film operation which, it turns out, is also partly financed by Mexican drug cartel gang members. The stakes and the body count in this hard-boiled thriller are higher than a box office smash hit, and far more deadly.

When Dick Moonlight PI is instructed by Homicide Detective Nick Miller at the Albany Police Department to investigate the double homicide of a pair of married lawyers up in Saratoga Springs during the thoroughbred racing season, he finds himself in the middle of a killing spree that just might get him and his sidekick, Fat Elvis, killed too.