Rick Bishop Novels Series

Some secrets are too dark to stay buried.   Pressed into helping his love-struck best friend track down a mysterious, beautiful girl that the friend shared a brief romantic beach encounter with, a lazy Honolulu private investigator finds himself chasing a ghost when he gets sucked into the vortex of a forty-year-old unsolved double homicide mystery. When the killer, one of Honolulu's wealthiest and most powerful men, targets him for elimination, the slothful sleuth must find out where all the bodies are buried and fast before it's game over for both him and the girl on the beach.   Rick Bishop, a former cop and lazy Honolulu private investigator who specializes in divorce investigations, reluctantly agrees to help his love-struck best friend, Joe Rose, track down a mysterious girl named Elle Palmer. Rose met the woman briefly on a moonlight stroll on a Waikiki beach. After the fleeting romantic encounter, Palmer vanished the same evening without a trace. Rose believes he is in love with the woman and that she is in grave danger.   Bishop begins his investigation apathetically, but when he meets the wealthy and powerful Hawaii pineapple magnate Derek Ballard, Rick grows more interested in the case. When he spots a photo of the woman Rose wants him to find in Ballard's office, Ballard explains the woman in the photo is his former fiancé, Elle Palmer, who committed suicide nearly forty years ago. As he continues to dig, Bishop discovers the girl on the beach was actually Kate Weaver, the niece of the long-deceased Elle Palmer. Rick also learns Weaver bears an uncanny resemblance to her dead aunt and appears in various places around Honolulu, claiming to be Elle Palmer while wearing the same ivory-colored formal dress her aunt was wearing the night friends and relatives last saw her alive at a party in 1982.   The plot thickens once Rick uncovers the motivation behind Kate's bizarre impersonations of her dead aunt's ghost. Weaver believes her aunt didn't commit suicide but that Derek Ballard murdered her in a jealous rage. Kate has traveled to Honolulu from California to expose Ballard as her aunt's killer. She pretends to appear as Elle Palmer's ghost as a ruse aimed at garnering enough publicity to encourage the Honolulu authorities to reopen the decades-old investigation into her aunt's death. Bishop decides to help Weaver get justice for her aunt after realizing she truly is in grave danger. Unfortunately, Derek Ballard intends to keep his dark secrets buried by shutting her up by any means necessary. Rick also becomes a target when Ballard tires of his interference and hires a Chinatown thug to eliminate him in a staged auto accident. Bishop and Weaver must find out where all the bodies are buried and fast before Ballard buries them.

The Rick Bishop private investigator series continues when a local attorney hires Bishop to find her missing friend and then insists on tagging along to help with his investigation. The missing friend has a sordid past. Her mob-connected ex-father-in-law wants to find her just as badly for about two million good reasons.   When Honolulu attorney Nicole Hersey hires Bishop to help her find her best friend Diane Clark, she insists on accompanying him in the search. In a financial bind, he agrees. Rick and Nicole follow her friend's trail to a small town on the North Shore, only to learn from the locals that Diane died there of heart failure. That literal dead end should have closed the investigation, but Bishop notices someone is tailing them. And, later, when the pair interviews the doctor who pronounced Diane dead, Rick's suspicions Diane isn't dead at all grow.   After confronting the man following them, Clifford Shepard, he informs Bishop he is an IRS special agent, also looking for Diane Clark because she had come into two million dollars recently but hasn't paid the taxes owed.   Once Rick uncovers more evidence that Diane Clark may have faked her death, he ends up in a cemetery in the middle of the night with his two closest friends Joe Rose and Koko Mahelona, intent on digging up Clark's casket. But just as they unearth the casket, three east coast mobsters from the mainland, also searching for Diane Clark, ambush them.   When Bishop's case takes a deadly turn, will the penurious PI find Diane Clark and her money before hitting his own dead end?   Dead End is the second book in the Rick Bishop series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

TROUBLE IS HIS BUSINESS   However, private investigator Rick Bishop isn't as hard-boiled as he likes to think he is. Since he's no Philip Marlowe, his close friends and associates think of him more as "half-boiled." Bishop may be irresponsible, unreliable, and unable or unwilling to meet basic adult responsibilities on his own, but he's actually a competent detective and generally manages to solve the case.   Honolulu P.I. Rick Bishop, a defective detective, likes nothing better than getting the goods on a cheating spouse and then collecting his fees in short-order, all with as little effort as possible. Divorce work is his métier. But when a smoking hot woman, Gemma Nelson, claiming to be the former mistress of a dead man, asks Bishop to prove her lover's jealous wife murdered him, desperate for a payday, Rick takes the job. It seems simple enough. But it isn't. Bishop thinks he knows what he's dealing with, but doesn't. Soon, the case plunges him into more trouble in paradise than he can handle—trouble with shady characters that want to scare him off the case, woman trouble, money trouble, trouble with the law, and even car trouble. First, Nelson isn't who she claims. And then she skips town, stiffing Rick for his fee. If Bishop can't find her and solve the case, an innocent woman could get framed for murder, and Rick's cash flow problems will explode into financial ruin.   Trouble in Paradise is perfect for those who enjoy suspenseful private detective novels with a generous helping of humor. It's the third book in the Rick Bishop Private Investigator series, but you may enjoy reading these stand-alone novels in any order.