Barre, Richard

Echo Bay

In Echo Bay, the past is on a collision course with the present. August 1940: In driving rain, in darkness, Lake Tahoe's fabled steamship, Constance, slips beneath the surface of Echo Bay. Present: Sean Rainey, ex-PR fixer, failed husband, once-hot Olympic ski prospect, is delivered an ultimatum. Sell the dream of raising Constance to the town he once fled ù a suspect in his popular brother's drowning deathùor lose his children. Because making no choice is his choice, Sean's return comes under an ever-darkening cloud of murder and deceit, hate and betrayal, big money and bad blood. To survive -- and to claim his children -- Sean must confront not only his own violent past, but an adversary hell-bent on destroying him and those he loves.

Blackheart Highway (Wil Hardesty Novels)

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...

"Haunting, compelling and beautifully written." -Harlan Coben, author of One False Move

"An absorbing, amusing thrill ride." -Santa Barbara Independent

The Ghosts of Morning

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. --Barbara Schlieper

In his Shamus Award-winning first novel, The Innocents, Richard Barre introduced audiences to Wil Hardesty, a private eye with a deep, dark past--and an uncertain future. In The Ghosts of Morning, Barre plunges further into Wil's history, to a far off place where murder and friendship collide.

Bearing Secrets (Wil Hardesty Novels)

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...

Bethany

Burning Moon: Library Edition (Wil Hardesty Novels)

The Innocents (Wil Hardesty Novels)

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.

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...

Burning Moon (Wil Hardesty Novels)

Richard Barre just won't let the past rest in peace. Like Ross Macdonald, one of his literary influences, he concocts modern detective tales in which the crimes are connected to, and disastrously complicated by, historical events.

Burning Moon finds Barre's Southern California surfer-turned-private eye, Wil Hardesty (introduced in the Shamus Award-winning The Innocents ), being hired by a Vietnamese refugee and fisherman, Vinh Tien. Vinh is sure that the disappearance at sea of his son, Jimmy, and Jimmy's pregnant girlfriend wasn't accidental, but can be blamed on their association with Vinh's younger brother, Luc, a "free-living, free-spending," and perpetually shadowy businessman. The case is convoluted enough on its surface, placing Hardesty in the middle of a family feud that may have contributed to Jimmy's death, and now threatens to propel Vinh's rebellious daughter into Luc's clutches, as well. Yet on top of all this are Luc's possible links with rivalrous Asian gangs; allegations that Jimmy cooperated with ATF agents against his uncle; and the revelation of Vinh's having once fought with the Viet Cong--a fact that, while troubling to Vietnam War vet Hardesty, positively enrages the local citizenry after Luc is murdered and Vinh becomes the prime suspect.

No less than the Tiens, Hardesty wears his history like a hair shirt. The surfing mishap that claimed his only son long ago, the dissolution of his 20-year marriage and a spiraling descent into the bottle--these things still weigh heavily on his mind, making him an easier target for clients in distress. "In a sense," the PI explains, "[saving people is] what I am. Depending on who you talk to, it may be all I am." Of course, not everybody wants to be saved, including Hardesty's accountant ex-wife and one of his oldest friends, who regular Barre's readers will recognize from an earlier series installment, The Ghosts of Morning. Burning Moon ignites slowly, as its underappreciated author outlines the cultural dynamics that are essential to this tale and reintroduces Hardesty (last seen in 1999's Blackheart Highway). However, Barre's vivid but economical prose and strong character development eventually make this Moon shine. --J. Kingston Pierce

Two brothersùVietnamese boat people who made good in America, each on a different side of the lawùconfront Hardesty with a hierarchy of Asian gangs whose tentacles lever unimagined deceit, betrayal and murder. Facing him as well: his most challenging personal crisis yet, involving ex-wife, Lisa. To survive, Hardesty must battle old demons and terrifyingly corrupt Asian gangs.

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